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AFTER THE PEACE 



By the Same Author 

THE RUSSIAN WORKER'S REPUBLIC 



AFTER THE PEACE 



BY 

HENRY NOEL BRAILSFORD 



SPECIALLY REVISED FOR THE AMERICAN EDITION 



W 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS SELTZER 

1922 



l4 U>^ o 

.61 



Copyright, 1922, by 
THOMAS SELTZER, Inc. 



All Rights Reserved 



©CJ.A6f)n082 



FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEBIOA 



NOV -8 1922 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 
Can Capitalism Feed Europe? 

Chapter I 



-Chapter II 

The Concentration of Power 
british sea-power . 
french military policy . 
british and french aims . 
the rule of the allies 
the future of the alliance 

Chapter III 



PAGB 
9 



The Politics of Babel . . 2.^ 

the economic decline ...»*... 3o 

a strategical settlement ...... 34 

the balkanization of europe ..... 45 



54 

60 
63 

73 
80 



An Echo of Malthus , . . ^ . . . , . 85 

COAL ............. 88 

THE INDEMNITY ..« ^ ,....,. 93 

EXPLOITATION <,*.»»*...-. 99 

Chapter IV 

How WILL Europe React? ........ 105 

THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION ........ IO9 

TOWN AND COUNTRY 1 17 

THE MILITARIST REACTION 12/ 



CONTENTS 

Chapter V 

PAGE 

The Mandates and the League . . . . . .135 

AN international CIVIL SERVICE ..... 137 

the politics of oil 14^ 

Conclusion 146 



INTRODUCTION 

CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 

Is the capitalist system breaking down as ^a method 
of production? The question may sound to most 
readers absurd, and when it is put in its concrete 
form, it may appear more absurd still. Are we 
nearing a point, within a few years, when it will be 
generally evident that, under the capitalist system, 
we can no longer obtain the food, fuel, clothes and 
houses necessary to maintain the dense populations 
of Europe at a civilized level of comfort and well- 
being? In Central Europe, in Italy and in Russia 
all intelligent men and women have been forced, by 
the dire experience of privation, to put this ques'- 
tion, and to answer it according to their lights. In 
this country, though we are alarmed by the fall in 
the real value of money, and know that high prices 
mean the scarcity of goods, our case is still so far 
endurable that few of us have begun to question 
the ability of a society based on profit as its motive 
force, to provide us with our daily bread. Even 
to those who have seen something of the present 
plight of the Continent, the question may seem au- 

9 



lo AFTER THE PEACE 

dacious. It is so much easier and so much less dis- 
turbing to say, what is true, that the visible decline 
of material civilization on the Continent is due to 
a protracted war, a rigorous blockade and a bad 
peace. These are the immediate causes of the short- 
age of goods. But what if the war, the blockade 
and the peace are themselves the result of forces 
and ways of thinking inseparable from capitalist 
Imperialism? Perhaps in this savage war and this 
merciless peace our capitalist society has revealed a 
lack, that is suicidal, of the spirit of fraternity and 
mutual aid. Perhaps it is this moral fault which 
discloses itself, slightly here, but tragically on the 
Continent, in the shortage of bread, clothes and 
houses. 

All of us have felt, if only in a moment of revela- 
tion, as we passed the beggar in the road or looked 
into the dreary dilapidation of a slum, that these 
broken lives and inhuman streets condemn our whole 
social system. It is, or was, however, a solid struc- 
ture. Whatever the saint or the poet might see in 
the case of the beggar, the fact was, and still is, 
that our capitalist society did survive acres of slums 
and thousands of beggars, long crises of unemploy- 
ment and years of scarcity. In spite of all this, it 
did produce the goods. Populations survived and 
multiplied, and on the whole the general level of 
comfort and education tended to rise. It is a ques- 
tion of scale and degree. Can this same capitalist 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? ri 

civilization survive the lapse of v^hole nations into 
a slum existence? We used to speak of the " sub- 
merged tenth " among ourselves. The problem now 
is of the submerged half in Europe. Poverty on 
this scale raises the general question. As the 
months and years go by, with their risks of fresh 
wars and revolutions, can this capitalist system, 
which has shown itself so egoistic and so predatory, 
revise what it has done, reverse the working of these 
motives, and make of Europe once more a habitable 
Continent? Or will the verdict of time and expe- 
rience, given not in cold blood, but amid the despairs, 
bereavements and nervous instability of semi-starva- 
tion, be that capitalism, evolving as it has done on 
militarist and Imperialist lines, can no longer pro- 
duce the goods which* the millions of civilized men 
require ? 

This way of stating the question was not the 
usual line of approach before the war. No one 
had then the audacity to doubt that a capitalist 
society could continue a production adequate at 
least to the demand for a bare subsistence. There 
was, to be sure, some economic criticism levelled at 
the admitted element of waste in the competitive sys- 
tem. But while we were aware that capitalism is 
vulnerable to an economic attack, it was on the 
whole the moral aspect which chiefly moved us. 
People who never dream of questioning the system 
which expects us all to work for the sole end of 



12 AFTER THE PEACE 

profit, are outraged by the ugly spectacle of " profit- 
eering." 

The war brought with it in every country a re- 
vival of the primitive social instincts. We were 
all in danger. We felt through several years as 
the primeval clan or tribe must have felt, in its vivid 
life of continual peril and collective ambition. The 
class struggle was repressed, and party warfare sus- 
pended. Even at home the nation made its con- 
tinual appeal to the motive of disinterested service, 
and that motive worked amid the drab surroundings 
of capitalist mass production in munition factories. 
In the army men were released for four years from 
the ordinary working of economic motives. They 
acted in this gigantic business of warfare as primi- 
tive peoples act in the ordinary routine of life. 
They acted under the spell of patriotic duty, and 
proved that the deepest thing in human nature is, 
not the competitive, but the social and co-operative 
instinct. The average man is taught by all his pas- 
tors and masters in a capitalist society that the hope 
of gain, whether in the form of profits or salary, is 
the one effective stimulus to effort. So it is, under 
the present industrial system. Yet something awak- 
ened in the breasts of these millions of men, which 
caused them, under the spur of an instinct of social 
service, to face dangers and privations, which very 
few would endure even for unlimited gain. To 
many of these men, though they were not fully con- 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 13 

scious of it, the capitalist system, with its crassly 
self-regarding motives, must have seemed' in some 
dim way irrelevant, even incongruous, when they 
returned to it. To spend these four years in risking 
life and health without thoughts of reward, for the 
mass of one's fellows dimly envisaged as a nation, 
and then to come back to serve some syndicate in 
the effort to extract the maximum of profit with the 
minimum of service from these same fellow-citizens 
regarded as consumers, here was a contradiction 
which caused many a man to feel vaguely ill at ease, 
even when it did not set him thinking. 

However this may be, it is the motive of social 
service which speaks in all the more vital and con- 
structive of our contemporary labor movements — 
in the Building Guild above all, and hardly less 
clearly in the miners' demand for the socialization of 
the mines. A new way of life emerges here, some- 
thing more broadly -social and more constructive 
than the inevitably defensive attitude of the older 
trade unionism. The other side of these movements 
implies no less obviously a moral criticism of cap- 
italism. Labor demands with growing insistence 
the self-governing guild or workshop. It feels the 
vanity, the slightness of that narrow old-world con- 
ception of democracy, which has ended autocracy 
in the State only to entrench it in industry. Where 
a man, by the mere fact that he owns land, mines 
or machines, can dictate to his felldw-men the con- 



14 AFTER THE PEACE 

ditions of their daily lives, there is no liberty. Nor 
is there even the beginning of democracy, while 
wealth, by its ownership of the press, controls our 
vision of the world, and weaves the texture of men^s 
minds, as a loom weaves cotton. The sense that 
we are neither free nor 'self -governing, the crafts- 
man's passion to express himself in better work, the 
wish to substitute the motive of service for the 
motive of gain, and also, perhaps, that unsatisfied 
prophetic vision, as old as the French Revolution, 
which tells us that the institutions under which we 
live depress our growth and stunt our development 
— these on the whole are the motives, all of them 
ethical, which favor the slow growth of socialistic 
thinking and organization in Great Britain. A So- 
cialism inspired by these tendencies will be academic 
and idealistic. It does not feel its problem urgent. 
It has to admit that capitalism does on the whole 
provide for most of us the elementary goods of life. 
It is critical, but mainly from the standpoint of a 
higher moral and social ideal. It is not stung by 
terror or need into violent action. Capitalism does 
on the whole deliver the goods. 

The march of events may possibly bring even this 
comfortable country, before many years have 
passed, to ask the disturbing question : Can capital- 
ism continue to produce the goods? There is some 
anxiety already. In the poorer middle class the 
standard of life has fallen since the war. There are 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 15 

signs among the manual workers that the motive 
of earning high wages no longer, for some reason, 
seems to be an adequate stimulus to maximum pro- 
duction. The pressure of taxation reveals among 
the employing class a phenomenon curiously resem- 
bling the policy of " ca' canny." When the Excess 
Profits Tax was increased, there is said to have been 
a rather noticeable tendency to cancel orders. The 
State, by this limitation of profits, seems to have 
impaired the working of the profit-making motive. 
And yet the State has not begun to face the prob- 
lem of paying off the war debt. So far from re- 
ducing, it adds to it. What would happen if the 
effort were really made in earnest? Every one of 
our late Allies is confronted by this dilemma, and 
shirks it. To go on with the present debts and the 
present expenditure means, not perhaps for us, but 
for every other people, literal bankruptcy. To tax 
adequately on the other hand, might rob this capital- 
ist society of the only motive for industry to which 
it is trained to respond — the expectation of high 
profits. It is possible that experience, even in these 
islands, may one day confront us with the funda- 
mental problem of finding, if our civilization is to 
survive, an alternative to capitalist production. 

What, if a victorious capitalist society had been 
capable of thought for the common good, would 
have been its policy at the end of the war? The 
fact which overshadowed all others in the world 



ii6 AFTER THE PEACE 

was the stoppage of production, the immeasurable 
injury to all the means of production, the dearth of 
goods, and all that this means in misery, starvation, 
ill-health and mental disturbance. A bureau of 
statisticians in Denmark has estimated the loss of 
lives due to the war at about 40,000,000. Tae reck- 
oning includes, of course, with the slain, the excess 
of deaths over the normal mortality among the civil- 
ian population and the decrease in births. The war, 
in short, had wiped out in Europe a population 
equal to that of France. There was the first and 
most grievous source of loss. The devastation was, 
if not the worst, certainly the most arresting aspect 
of the whole ghastly panorama. But more alarm- 
ing by far than the devastation was the fact that 
the entire industry of Central Europe, owing to 
the blockade, stood idle for want of raw materials. 
Everything was short, from food to clothes, from 
cattle to locomotives. There were whole regions, 
bigger than the British Isles, notably that Russo- 
Polish borderland, which the Grand Duke Nicholas 
gutted in his retreat, from which every trace of 
civilization had disappeared. If the minds of our 
statesmen could have shed the artificial thinking of 
the war, they would have seen their problem in terms 
of goods. To talk of making democracy secure 
was the rhetoric of a man thinking amid American 
plenty. What democracy wanted then, wants still, 
and will want for years to come, is bread and sugar 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 17 

and butter, plain warm clothes, medicines and soap, 
ploughs and lorries and locomotives, coal and cotton 
and iron. The problem of problems was to supply 
these things, to stimulate and organize their mass- 
production. The Allied Governments had faced a 
similar problem during the war, when they organ- 
ized the mass-production of shells. The problem of 
peace was to organize the production of necessary 
things as promptly, and on an even larger world- 
wide scale. In November, 19 18, this could have 
been done, for the victors had unlimited authority 
and prestige. Examine what in fact they did, and 
one might suppose that their conscious aim had been 
to aggravate and perpetuate the shortage. Instead 
of turning the war-time control of industry to this 
beneficent purpose, they abolished first the interna- 
tional and then the national controls of industry, 
shipping, and raw materials. Instead of turning all 
the metal industries to the making of locomotives, 
lorries and productive machinery, they allowed them 
to revert to the making of luxuries. More incred- 
ible still, they prolonged the blockade of Central 
Europe for nine months, and tightened it (save only 
in the supply of food-stuffs), as it never had been 
tightened during the war. What was Germany? 
An enemy, if you will, a sinner, if you must talk 
morals. But Germany was also by far the most pro- 
ductive portion of the Continent. A far-sighted, in- 
ternationally-minded dictator would have acted in 



i8 AFTER THE PEACE 

precisely the reverse way. He would have pourea 
raw materials and fertilizers into every German port. 
He would not merely have permitted — he would 
have insisted — that every lathe, every forge, every 
loom in Germany, should work to its fullest capac- 
ity. He would have spared nothing in credits to 
set the process of manufacturing going. As for 
Russia, one need not pause to say that he would have 
avoided the lunacy of our inglorious expeditions 
and our subsidized civil war. He would have in- 
quired what were Moscow's terms to resume the 
production and export of grain, timber, flax and oil. 
So far from setting barriers between the idle fac- 
tory in Berlin and the hoarded grain of South Rus- 
sia, he would have ordered Berlin, on pain of a 
victor's displeasure, to make locomotives for Mos- 
cow in exchange for Russian wheat. If this hard 
work had interrupted the diplomacy and the elec- 
tions, the map-drawing and the reckoning of indem- 
nities, the delay would not have irked him. One 
does not save civilization by drawing maps. One 
saves it by food and fuel, by the work which re- 
stores sanity to the artisan, hope to the mother, and 
health to the child. 

The follies of this first winter of half -peace pro- 
duced their instant effects. While the Allies were 
still debating the first of their series of Treaties, the 
blockade and famine brought about successful, if 
short-lived, communist revolutions in Hungary and 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 19 

Bavaria, not to mention momentary attempts, seri- 
ous enough to be symptomatic, in several German 
towns. This warning taught nothing to Paris. It 
elaborated a peace which seemed designed to per- 
petuate the economic death of half a continent. 
One may sum up the Treaty of Versailles in a sen- 
tence. It robbed Germany at once of the means 
of production, and of the motive for production. 
While this Treaty stands unrevised, there can be 
no resumption, save on the puniest scale, of the 
activity which, in the generation before the war, 
had made Germany the workshop of the Continent. 
But Germany, the reader objects, was an enemy, a 
disturber of the peace, the practitioner of an espe- 
cially virulent form of militarism. Grant the moral 
case against her. We are talking economics. Her 
ruin is the biggest factor in the world-shortage, as 
the exclusion of Russia from the European grain- 
market is the second. 

In these two achievements, the laming of German 
industry and the pushing of Russia outside the 
European system of trade, our victorious capitalist 
society showed a lack of the elementary social in- 
stinct of self-preservation. It worked against life, 
against creation, against production. It organized 
famine and produced death. It showed in its exer- 
cise of patronage a total disregard for the interests 
of world-production. It crushed the most produc- 
tive people, forgetting that production carried to the 



20 AFTER THE PEACE 

high level attained in Central Europe can be the 
fruit only of generations of education, science and 
organization. It showered its favors on Poles, 
Roumanians and Jugo-Slavs, primitive unschooled 
races, not indeed without their own charm and emo- 
tional genius, who never, even after generations of 
experience, are likely to replace the Germans as in-. 
dustrial or intellectual workers. 

The reader may grant, perhaps, that this rough 
statement answers to the facts. A combination of 
circumstances, the war itself, its undue prolongation, 
the inevitable working of the blockade, the natural 
prejudice against the violent Russian revolution, 
the personal failings of statesmen, the passing emo- 
tional exaltation of war-time — all these things have 
deflected us, in many large matters, from the path 
which cool reason would have dictated; but why 
blame the capitalist -system? It is always easy to 
dwell on the accidents of history, until the meaning 
of its processes is obscured. If the Kaiser's roman- 
tic vanity had been proof against the promptings 
of his military clique, or if the Tsar had had the 
intelligence to deal with those generals who on their 
own confession " lied " to him about the Russian 
general mobilization, we might have escaped the 
war. If Mr. Lloyd George could have resisted the 
temptation to make a khaki election, or if Mr. Wil- 
son had been less of a moralist and more of an 
economist, we might have had a tolerable peace. 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 21 

On a broad view, however, can any one doubt that 
the war itself was a crisis conditioned, nay, created, 
by the whole course of our capitalistic development? 
These vast modern industries, whether in Lancashire 
or Westphalia, produced year by year their immense 
surplus of profits. This rapidly accumulated cap- 
ital was exported every year to primitive countries, 
where labor is cheap, factory laws non-existent, and 
native governments weak, pliable and corruptible. 
Behind this exportation, bargaining to secure for 
each national group the opportunities which it cov- 
eted abroad in concessions, loans, and monopolized 
spheres of economic interest, stood the Great 
Powers. They str'ove by their unending competi- 
tion in armaments, each to make a Balance of Power 
favorable to itself. For what was power desired? 
Power meant the ability to secure footholds over- 
seas where there are railways to build, coolies to 
exploit, and raw materials to monopolize. In a 
world that lives and trades and thinks within the 
capitalist system, every war will be a capitalist war. 
One may dispute over its immediate occasion, assess 
the personal responsibilities, refine upon the idealistic 
aims which doubting, horrified, war-weary nations 
were taught to entertain, and did in our case un- 
questionably cherish with entire sincerity in the 
earlier years of the war. The fact remains that 
every big war is primarily a test of strength, in 
which the world's balance of power is adjusted for 



22 AFTER THE PEACE 

years or decades to come. If you would judge the 
true character of a man, watch him when fortune 
has put power into his hands. If you would meas- 
ure the morals of a society, scrutinize it in the mo- 
ment of conscious omnipotence. If you would know 
what a war was about, study the terms of peace. 

We know, more or less, what sort of terms the 
enemy would have imposed, had he won the war. 
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a specimen. The 
proposal to take in whole or part the mineral re- 
sources of Belgium and Northern France shed a 
ray of light lipon motives. The hand and brain of 
this German capitalist society worked with a cer- 
tain brutal frankness. Turn to the Treaty of Ver- 
sailles and its sequels, and the same thinking, half- 
strategic, half -economic, is no less legible. Here 
coal-fields, there oil-fields, elsewhere great tropical 
estates are appropriated : whole chapters rob the in- 
dtfstry of the vanquished of its tools, its ships, its 
raw materials, its iron, its coal. Other chapters 
stamp out the agencies and the rights on which its 
foreign trade had depended: the "penetration" of 
German capital outside German territory is ended 
once for all, and the " penetration " of Allied capital 
imposed, organized and legalized in its place. A 
responsible Liberal Minister blurted out in Parlia- 
ment, midway in the war, the truth that our war- 
aim was that German trade should never again 
" raise its head." That intention is written all over 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED^ EUROPE? 23 

these Treaties. The capitahstic motive is revealed 
not merely in the fact that in trade and territory we 
took much for ourselves. It was revealed even 
more clearly in the elaborate measures which we 
adopted to ruin our chief competitor. 

We hav6 now come to the kernel of our problem. 
We started by asking whether capitalism could con- 
tinue to produce the necessary goods on a scale ade- 
quate to ensure modest comfort to dense populations. 
We 'have seen that under the pressure of the competi- 
tive motive, the victorious Allies lamed, if they did 
not quite ruin, the productive capacity of Central 
Europe. Is there really any anomaly in such a 
phenomenon ? There is none. The aim of capital- 
ist industry is not maximum production, but maxi- 
mum profit. Sometimes the two may coincide. 
Often they clash. Brazil, for example, has an or- 
ganized system, regulated by law, by which part of 
the coffee crop is destroyed every year if it exceeds 
a fixed level, in order to prevent a fall in prices. 
The logic of tariffs is based on the same reasoning. 
Capitalism does not aim primarily at the abundance 
of cheap goods. It aims at high profits and great 
accumulations. A shortage may serve it better than 
plenty, and its history is full of cases in which 
trusts and rings have organized a shortage and 
thriven on it. When the Allies ruined, or at least 
paralyzed, German industry, they were acting in 
the spirit of such a ring. For a time, and for lim- 



24 AFTER THE PEACE 

ited groups of capitalist producers, these tactics may 
mean immeasurable gains. To the whole body of 
consumers in the world, and even to the consumers 
in Allied countries, this policy was treason. It was 
an irrational, uneconomic policy from the standpoint 
of the general good. It is intelligible only on the 
assumption that on the whole, and subject to many 
checks and concessions, the trade policy of a capital- 
ist state is based, not on the general good, but on the 
interest of the ruling capitalist class. Never in the 
world's history has the demonstration of this sus- 
picion been carried through on so vast a scale. 
Never before has the shortage of goods, produced 
by deliberate political sabotage, confronted us with 
the question — " Can capitalism continue to supply 
the world's needs? '* 

It is no passing phase that we are considering. 
The world did indeed know, in the middle years of 
last century, a phase of capitalism which was com- 
paratively free from these evils. The Manchester 
School sought peace, and combated the belief that 
the ruin of its neighbors is of advantage to a nation. 
It was the fated march of economic Imperialism in 
all countries which led to this war and this peace. 
It was an inevitable development of the capitalist sys- 
tem, and it brings with it its shadow, militarism. 
In this peace they have perpetuated themselves. On 
this basis we can never escape the dominion of force. 
Those whom we have wronged will scheme how to 



CAN CAPITALISM FEED EUROPE? 25 

use force against us. We shall never dare to allow 
Germany to recover her industrial prosperity, be- 
cause she would infallibly use it, sooner or later, to 
disrupt our system of fetters and handicaps, to re- 
write these Treaties, to shatter our ascendancy. We 
may under stress of the dire need of bread patch up 
a commercial truce with Russia, but here again, the 
fears which must endure, while we possess the bal- 
ance of force, will forbid Russia also to acquiesce 
in our system for the government of the world. In 
this condition of danger, wrong, resentment and 
fear, the world cannot evolve a system which should 
aim at maximum production and general prosperity. 
Capitalism has no such principle of solidarity and 
fraternity. 

The future is dark. We can see that the con- 
tinued pursuit of policies, which are inimical to crea- 
tion, to production, to life itself, may in the end 
doom the capitalist system. It does not follow that 
an alternative -system is capable of realizing itself. 
The evolutionary strategy of British Guild Socialism 
offers its high hopes, but years and decades must 
pass before it could so completely replace capitalist 
industry as to transform the motives and aims of 
our international policy. The revolutionary strat- 
egy of Russian communism leads in its first struggles 
to shock, disorganization, the decline of production 
and the lowering of standards. The hostility of the 
capitalist world has seen to it that this gigantic social 



26 AFTER THE PEACE 

experiment shall not be tested under favorable con- 
ditions. Whether it can succeed by its own prin- 
ciples of co-operative production, in vieing with 
capitalistic production, remains as yet a theoretical 
possibility and nothing more. The fact that con- 
fronts us is world-shortage, the dwindling of popu- 
lations, the decay of industries, the twilight of civil- 
ization. 



CHAPTER I 

THE POLITICS OF BABEL 

Diplomatic Conferences have rarely in European 
history done their work in a revolutionary temper. 
They have tended rather to patch and mend, in a 
spirit of conservatism. The main business of the 
Congress of Vienna was to undo the catastrophic 
changes of the Napoleonic era. For twenty years 
before it met, French armies had obliterated fron- 
tiers in their stride, and tossed crowns upon their 
bayonets. At Vienna the victorious monarchs de- 
creed a return to the pre-revolutionary age. Even 
the Congress of Berlin did much to minimize the 
results of the Russo-Turkish war. For the first 
time, in the Peace Conference at Paris, Great Pow- 
ers acted in a radical spirit. To call the work done 
at Paris revolutionary, might be to flatter the archi- 
tects of the new Europe. The ideas which guided 
them were neither novel nor large. No new philos- 
ophy of life or politics has shaped the details of these 
Treaties. To the doctrine of internationalism, our 
statesmen did indeed m.ake their submission. Hav- 
ing recognized it, they buried it in a species of 

27 



28 AFTER THE PEACE 

preface. Between the Covenant of the Lieague of 
Nations and the Treaties themselves, there is only 
this relationship, that both are bound in the same 
volume. The ideas which have shaped these Treat- 
ies are those of the old world which shattered itself 
in the war. It is not the unbending logic of the 
idealist which has made this sweeping settle- 
ment. Fear and ambition, and not the dynamite of 
new doctrine, have wrought these catastrophic 
changes. 

The effect, none the less, baffles the spectator's 
imagination. This settlement has transformed the 
daily outlook, the habitual scene for hundreds of 
millions of human beings. A dozen new independ- 
ent States have sprung into life on the ruins of shat- 
tered Empires. Those are rulers who were rebels: 
Monarchy survives only on the fringes of the Con- 
tinent. The imperial governing races of Austria 
and Hungary, accustomed to play their part in the 
high politics of a Continent, enjoy to-day less than 
the status of the smaller neutrals. What was the 
ruling caste in Bohemia, Posen and Transylvania, is 
now the subject race, fain to cling to the protection 
of a Charter which its late enemies have framed 
for it. The Hapsburg Empire is a memory, while 
the Turks, on a fragment of their former territory, 
must bow to the permanent control of Christian 
Powers. Poland and Greece, inflated into minor 
Empires by the favor of the victors, take a pre- 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 29 

carious rank among the secondary Powers. 
To these external changes, there corresponds a 
profound akeration in men's minds. MilHons of 
men of the German race who had for fifty years 
grown accustomed to the idea that their energy, their 
science, their gift of organization had made them a 
leading power in the world and the first power upon 
the Continent, are beaten to-day into the acceptance 
of passivity. The fact is not merely that their 
power is shrunken, as the power of France shrank 
after 1870. They are incapable of action in any 
direction, and they know that for a generation their 
lot is to obey. The hammer has become the anvil. 
It is difficult, even if one allows one's imagination to 
play upon this theme, to realize the mental disturb- 
ance which this downfall involves in the life of the 
average middle-class German. He has lost the am- 
bitions which gave to existence a great part of its 
meaning, and with them has gone in some measure 
his personal self-respect, for all the world over, the 
average man derives much of his self-confidence 
from his pride in the society to which he belongs. 
A defeat so catastrophic, an abasement so deep as 
this, shatters not merely the power of the State, but 
the conventions and the social morality of its mem- 
bers. The German bureaucracy is less confident and 
less assertive than it was, but it is also much less 
honest. Its pride is humbled, but with its pride, 
its former high standard of duty has been lowered. 



30 AFTER THE PEACE 

THE ECONOMIC DECLINE 

Large as are the political changes which date from 
the victory of the Allies, they are trivial in com- 
parison with the economic transformation. Ger- 
many has lost all but a fraction of her mercantile 
marine, and three-fourths of her iron ore, while 
her coal supply has dwindled to the half of what 
it was before the war. The problem of the im- 
mediate future is not whether Germany can recover 
any part of her world-power, but whether she can 
contrive to feed her present population. Desperate 
as her case might seem, if it were isolated, it is al- 
most enviable in comparison with that of German 
Austria. In Vienna, where the deaths month by 
month are sometimes double the births, a great city, 
with' a singularly gracious and fruitful civilization, 
is literally dying out under our eyes.^ 

^ Thus the vital statistics of Vienna gave for February, 
1920, a mortality in round figures of 4,000 against 1,800 births. 
Mr. A. G. Gardiner, in one of his moving and persuasive arti- 
cles in the Daily News, has given figures which show that this 
ratio of two deaths to one birth obtained throughout the first 
twelve weeks of 1920 (5,044 births, 10,767 deaths). According 
to the official white paper [Economic Conditions in Central 
Europe (II). Miscellaneous No. 6 (1920, Cmd. 641)], the 
mortality from January to October^ 191 9, was 32,288, while 
the births numbered 19,612. The same official report gives 
the main facts about the conditions which explain these vital 
statistics. In peace time Vienna used to consume 900,000 liters 
of milk daily. The average is now 30,000 liters daily. In 
other words, Vienna has milk enough at the normal rate to 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 31 

But, indeed, the scene which presents itself to the 
inquirer, from the .Rhine to the Volga, varies only 
in the shading of its sombre colors. Everywhere 
the war and the blockade have produced the same 
results. The big shaping facts are the economic 
facts, and these differ rather in degree than in kind. 
Everywhere coal is short, and with this shortage the 
wheels of industry slow down. Everywhere raw 
materials are scarce or absent. Everywhere the 
sinking of the currency has all but stopped the im- 
port of foreign goods. Everywhere the railways 
are disorganized and the rolling stock worn out. 
Everywhere there has been a depreciation of all the 
productive machinery of civilization, animate and 
inanimate, animal and human. Nothing has been 
repaired or replaced for five strenuous years. The 
creaking machinery lacks oil. The traveller who 
knew the orderly strenuous Germany of pre-war 
days is aghast when he sees outside every big rail- 
supply its needs for exactly one day in every month. The 
official ration of coal, we are told, is about half a cwt. per 
family per month, and few families receive even this amount. 
At the end of December, 1919, the official food rations were: 
bread, 2^ lb.; flour, 9 oz. ; fats, 4 oz. ; meat, 4 oz. per head 
per week. Sugar and potatoes are nominally rationed, but 
no regular distribution could be made! These rations would 
yield 1,271 calories daily. The usual consumption of a 
healthy adult in full work is about 3,000 calories, and the 
lowest number on which health can be maintained may be 
2,300 calories. Small wonder that, as this report states, 80 to 
85 per cent, of the children up to three years of age in the 
working and lower middle class are suffering from rickets. 



32 AFTER THE PEACE 

way station a mortuary of locomotives, where hun- 
dreds of once valuable machines cumber the rails, 
rusty and useless. The fields are hungry and sterile 
for lack of manure. The surviving cattle are thin. 
The horses in the streets look like skeletons. The 
men and women drag themselves along listless and 
anaemic. The relics of a tradition of order, clean- 
liness and education have somewhat arrested the de- 
cay in Germany and Austria. In Poland, which 
never at the best was orderly, educated or clean, the 
scene of ruin is even more distressing. Russia pre- 
sents her special phase of the general breakdown. 
Revolution has introduced its own peculiar com- 
plications, but the same mortality, the same dearth 
of materials, the same decline in comfort, wealth 
and health, may be found in " red '* Moscow, 
" white " Budapest, and colorless Vienna. Every- 
where the manual worker sullenly asks himself 
whether his fate and that of his children will be to 
exist, year in, year out, on one-half of the food 
allowance necessary for health. Everywhere the in- 
tellectual worker, from the small official to the artist 
and the teacher, faces the fact that his home standard 
of comfort has sunk below that of the organized 
artisans. In Germany one hears of a group of " in- 
tellectuals," including former University lecturers, 
who have formed a co-operative society to work a 
mine of brown coal with their own hands. In Aus- 
tria a society of ex-officers is setting up its members 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 33 

as shoemakers, while a foreign charitable organiza- 
tion appeals for gifts of old clothes for the profes- 
sors of Vienna University, and for money to supply 
its students with a free breakfast. AlHed Italy, 
though she counts herself a victor, sends her 
Premier to sit on the Triumvirate which governs 
this chaotic world, and measures the annexations and 
the spheres of the influence which are her share in 
the gains of the war, is only a little further from 
bankruptcy than enemy Germany. Her expenditure 
is three times her revenue. To bring the loaf within 
the purchasing capacity of the workers, it must be 
subsidized, and sold at one-fifth of its real cost. 
Three meatless days a week are now enforced in 
Italy. Poland's case may be measured by the fact 
that the Budget presented in the autumn of 19 19 
showed an expenditure eight times the revenue. At 
first these signs of sickness were thought to be tem- 
porary, and every one looked for the amendment 
which the formal ratification of peace would bring 
with it. It does not come; it does not even begin. 
The decay of civilization is a phrase easily abused. 
It means in this connection something quite definite 
— the gradual abandonment of the refinements and 
all the intellectual ambitions of life. In Russia two 
years have passed, thanks to the paper shortage, 
since any new scientific book was published. In 
Austria all the girls' secondary schools are closing 
for lack of funds. Everywhere in Central Europe 



34 AFTER THE PEACE 

the fall of the exchange, which makes it impossible 
to purchase anything in the currencies of the West, 
has set up a veritable intellectual blockade. Cen- 
tral Europe is isolated. None but the richest of the 
war-profiteers can afford to travel abroad. No 
newspaper can keep a correspondent in the West, 
or pay for telegrams or contributed articles. Nor 
can University libraries or learned men afford to 
buy even scientific books abroad. Intellectual life 
has become bounded within national frontiers as it 
was never before in the history of Europe. Under 
the pressure of this grinding poverty, sooner or later, 
unless the decay is arrested, the urban civilization of 
Europe will be as dead as the culture of Babylon, 
and there will survive only peasant communities, 
narrow, reactionary and clerically-minded. 

A STRATEGICAL SETTLEMENT 

When one turns from this scene to the frame- 
work which the AlHes constructed for it at Paris, 
the first impression is one of incongruity. Few 
admirers are left even among the victorious Allies 
of this fantastic and inhuman peace, but perhaps 
its strangest characteristic is not its harshness, but 
its irrelevance. It was a peace based on a reading 
of the facts which had gradually shaped itself in the 
early months and years of the war. The power of 
the German war-machine had made an ineffaceable 
imprint on men's minds. Ludendorff's arm had 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 35 

been omnipotent from Finland to the Caucasus. 
Northern France, Belgium, Venetia* Roumania and 
Serbia were still counting their liberation by weeks. 
The Conference met, moreover, in Paris, and re- 
freshed its memories by visits to the devastated de- 
partments. A saner peace might have been dic- 
tated had Marshal Foch actually marched into Ber- 
lin, or better still, if the Allies had revived history 
by meeting in a new Congress of Vienna. In 
Vienna, or even in Berlin, these statesmen would 
have realized how complete was the moral and mate- 
rial collapse of the enemy peoples. Many months 
passed before the truth was realized. No one would 
believe that Gefrmany was starving, until our sol- 
diers in the occupied zone protested that they could 
bear the sight of it no longer. Fabricated tales 
were still circulated of the flood of exports which 
German industry had ready to " dump " upon our 
market. Mr. Lloyd George, promising the electo- 
rate an indemnity of 24,000 millions sterling, may 
possibly have deceived himself as well as the voters. 
Above all, no one could grasp the fact that the mili- 
tary machine was really broken. We seem to have 
had no conception of the texrifLc efficacy of our own 
blockade, and it was presumably because we dreaded 
either a revival of the enemy's military power, or 
else a too sudden revival of his competitive economic 
energy, that we continued this blockade for nine 
superfluous months, after the Germans had signed 



36 AFTER THE PEACE 

an armistice which rendered -any further resistance 
impossible. When history surveys the crimes of 
both sides in the wap, it will brand this continuance 
of the blockade as the most brutal and the least 
excusable of them all. 

In point of fact Germany waS, during these 
months of suspense, adapting herself with marvel- 
lous docility to the prospect of that Wilsonian peace 
which had been promised her. The zest in armsi 
was long ago extinct. Other armies were demob- 
ilized: this army melted away. In Poland, when 
the hour of collapse arrived, the German garrison 
tamely allowed itself to be disarmed by the boys of 
Pilsudski's secret Socialist army, who had hardly a 
rifle among them. Some even trampled on their 
iron crosses, as they surrendered their weapons. 
Nowhere in the world did the entire working class 
gasp out its "never again'* more fervently. The 
press of Germany teemed with articles in favor of 
the League of Nations. She clung to it as her one 
rock of salvation. As for Austria, the pacifism of 
a Quaker Meeting is halting and hilf -hearted com- 
pared with the furious hatred of war and arms, of 
violence and violent men, which swept over the 
whole class of manual and intellect: .al workers. Of 
bitterness towards the victors there was as yet no 
trace. In that formative hour of defeat, the mass- 
mind of Central Europe was set determinedly to- 
wards peace and reconciliation, and had the Allies 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL' 37 

drafted ^ settlement, honestly based upon the Four- 
teen Points, which looked to the future and sought 
to continue a new world free from the domination 
of force, they would have found that the moral 
preparation for the change had gone further in 
Central Europe than in any other quarter of the 
world. 

In fact, the Allies drafted a peace which looked 
only to the past. In every clause one can hear the 
accents of a vengeful fear. This peace would have 
been explicable had it been imposed on the Germany 
of 1 9 14 — a Germany still penetrated with mili- 
tarism, still venerating its " War Lord," contempt- 
uous of democracy, unbroken in spirit, organized for 
war, and teeming with unsquandered wealth. It 
was the Germany of 19 14 that the Allies had in 
mind- — ^they had seen no other. Applied to the 
Germany of 19 19, half -starved, pitiably tame, 
equipped with her new Republican forms, governed 
by a semi-Socialist Government, and so poor that 
she barely retained the decencies of life, it was at 
once cruel and ridiculous. In part, a sincere dread 
of German militarism survived and animated the 
Treaty. In part, it must be ascribed to the ambition 
of the French, that their own restored miHtary as- 
cendancy should dominate the Continent. In some 
degree, since the French were bent on the ruin of 
Germany, they were shrewd enough to reckon that 
the passion of revenge would sooner or later assert 



38 AFTER THE PEACE 

itself among the conquered. The provocations of 
militarism are not always the result of unreflecting 
greed and vainglory. Militarism needs a danger. 
It can impose its own caste discipline at home only 
if there is a peril across the frontier to which it can 
always point. There is little doubt that Bismarck 
consciously exploited the question of Alsace in this 
spirit. He rejected a policy of conciliation, because 
a disaffected Alsace and a vengeful France were 
arguments which he could always use in order to 
resist democracy and pacifism in Germany. The 
same calculations may have influenced some of those 
who devised the peace of Versailles. It made a 
danger, and skillfully diffused that danger over the 
whole map of Europe, in order to create a perma- 
nent league under French leadership. To each of 
the minor Allies, from Belgium to Roumania, some- 
thing was given, which must keep alive against her 
the enmity of the vanquished, and force her to rely 
on the major Allies for protection. The small 
nation which commits a wrong against its neighbor 
forfeits in that hour its independence. It must rely 
on stronger Powers to ensure to it the enjoyment 
of its gains. Strategy, accordingly, has competed 
with the ordinary economic motives of Imperialism 
for the first place as the shaping force of these 
Treaties. German militarism was smitten to the 
ground, partly by physical exhaustion and partly by 
the moral revulsion that its own excessive discipline 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 39 

had brought about. In the Treaties the Allies, leg- 
islating under the spur of memory, laboriously pro- 
ceeded once more to slay the slain. 

Many chapters of these Treaties tell their own 
tale. The strategical motive is sufficiently apparent 
in the clauses which dictate the one-sided disarma- 
ment of the enemy, provide for the neutralization 
and occupation of the Rhine provinces, and forbid 
for all time the revival of a German navy or air- 
force, the failure to impose any parallel measure of 
disarmament on other States, and the extreme im- 
probability that this omission will afterwards be 
corrected, which stamps these provisions as articles 
of enslavement. ISTor need one waste space in point- 
ing out, what is frankly admitted, that strategy alone 
explains the gift to Italy of the purely German South 
Tyrol. Strategy also and not nationalism is the 
basis of the Italian claim to dominate the Eastern 
shore of the Adriatic. A careful study of the map 
would reveal repeated instances — at Eupen and 
Malmedy, at Pressburg, on the new German-Polish 
frontier — of this preoccupation with military ques- 
tions. The draftsmen of these maps were evidently 
under no delusion that they had fought " a war to 
end war." They put their trust not in the new ma- 
chinery of the League of Nations, but in the old 
classical devices of the impregnable mountain bar- 
rier, and the sea channel commanded by guns. 

It was, however, in the dismemberment of Haps- 



40 AFTER THE PEACE 

burg Dominions that the strategic motive revealed 
itself most clearly. We all recollect those alarm- 
ing propaganda maps which in the later years of the 
war made it, even in popular opinion, what it cer- 
tainly was in its diplomatic origins, a struggle for 
the roads of the East. A turning-point in the evolu- 
tion of Allied war-aims was reached when Mr. Wil- 
son, chancing upon one of these maps, based the 
most relentless of his speeches upon it. Here, we 
were told, in this Berlin-Bagdad railway line, was 
the spinal cord of the enemy organism. Though the 
Allies used the doctrine of self-determination to jus- 
tify their dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, no 
candid historian will deny that the real motive which 
led them to recognize, one by one, the claims to 
separation of the Austro-Hungarian nationalities, 
was less a regard for the abstract principle of nation- 
ality than a resolve to cut Germany's road to the 
East, and to ring her round with a galaxy of hos- 
tile States moving in the Allied orbit. One need 
not point to the painfully numerous instances in 
which the Allies defy the doctrine of self-determina- 
tion in their own dominions. It is enough to show 
that they made no real attempt to apply it honestly 
in their dealings with the enemy. They have made 
of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia composite polyglot 
States, packed with recalcitrant and reluctant min- 
orities, which repeat on a somewhat smaller scale 
the weaknesses of the Hapsburg Dominions. The 



THE POLITICS OF BABEU ^t 

worst of these cases is the subjection of over three 
millions of Germans to Czech rule. It is sometimes 
impossible in Central Europe to disentangle the races 
which live intermingled. The German minority in 
Bohemia and Moravia lives, however, mainly along 
the fringes of these provinces, and for -the most part 
in compact masses. It could have been detached 
with ease and united in the north to Germany and in 
the south to Austria. It called in vain for the right 
to decide its own fate, only to meet with the reply 
that the Allies, who have rightly disregarded his- 
tory in their other dispositions, were bound to re- 
spect the historic borders of the ancient Bohemian 
kingdom. Even more obviously the consequence of 
strategical thinking was the refusal to permit Ger- 
man Austria to follow the nearly unanimous desire 
of her population for union with Germany. It is 
true that the League of Nations has theoretically the 
power to sanction this union, but since the decision 
of its Council must, according to the Covenant, be 
unanimous, it is obvious that France alone has the 
power to veto this solution for all time. A grosser 
or more partisan violation of the right of self-de- 
termination it would be difficult to invent. There 
is only one sufficient explanation of it. The central 
trade-routes of Europe, by rail and river, pass 
through Vienna. While Austria is kept outside the 
German system, the Bagdad railway remains under 
Allied military control, and Germany is kept at a 



42 AFTER THE PEACE 

safe distance from Turkey and the Straits. Each 
of these new creations, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and 
the greater Serbia, was recommended by Allied 
propaganda as an essential " barrier " or " bulwark " 
against " Germanism," while Poland had the dub- 
ious felicity to be a barrier against Berlin and Mos- 
cow at once. The work has been done with mas- 
terly completeness. No train runs from Berlin to 
Bagdad, nor are we likely in our day to see one. 
Half a dozen frontier systems intersect the route, 
and at the stations where wheezy engines repose 
from the tasks beyond their strength, starving chil- 
dren beset the empty goods yard, and throng about 
the carriages of the waiting local trains, with their 
monotonous cry for " a bit of bread." 

It is no answer to such criticisms to say that at 
the moment of the armistice the dismemberment of 
Austria-Hungary was inevitable. It was so only 
because the Allies had already made it so in their 
Secret Treaties, and prolonged the war until their 
extremer purposes could be realized. It was so 
only because the nationalist extremists of these vari- 
ous nationalities, counting on the known intention 
of the Allies to dismember, had frustrated all the 
efforts of Viennese statesmanship to arrive at a 
federal solution. But even if it be conceded that 
the political disintegration had become in the last 
year of the war inevitable, that does not acquit the 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 43 

Allies of the charge that they completed the mate- 
rial and cultural ruin of this country by their fail- 
ure to impose as a condition of political independ- 
ence, the entry of all the Danubian States into an 
economic federation. It was a commonplace 
among all students of Central Europe that whatever 
were the political shortcomings of the Hapsburg 
Monarchy, it conferred an inestimable benefit on its 
populations by securing economic unity. A great 
continental area, with very various capacities for 
production in its divers parts, enjoyed a single cur- 
rency, an excellent transport system, and the benefit 
of internal free-trade. It produced within its own 
borders nearly everything necessary for a high civil- 
ization, but its parts were mutually interdependent. 
Here grain, there meat, here timber, there minerals 
and elsewhere manufactures were the staples of an 
active interchange. This single economic system 
was shattered at the armistice. Its two ports of 
Trieste and Fiume were cut away. Six currencies, 
six railway systems, six sets of tariffs, six sets of 
economic controls and prohibitions were at once set 
up to isolate these interdependent parts of a single 
organism. Every one knows the consequences to 
Vienna. This city of two million souls, isolated in 
an unproductive Alpine country, must bring its corn 
from America and its coal from England, because 
its former sources of supply are closed. It starves, 



44 AFTER THE PEACE 

while Greater Serbia at its doors enjoys the rude 
plenty of a superabundant but tmmarketable food 
supply. All the currencies of these States have 
dropped to nearly vanishing point on the exchange, 
but not to an equal degree, and the variations be- 
tween the Czech and Serbian crowns, as compared 
with the Austrian, would be a barrier to trade, even 
if it were not necessary to overcome several pro- 
hibitions, and to bribe several starving officials be- 
fore one truck of goods can be moved upon the 
railway. Tariffs, which in normal times would 
hamper trade, are a trifle compared with the im- 
perious controls and embargoes which prohibit, in 
most of these States, any export whatever. The 
Czechs have even abolished the parcel post to Aus- 
tria. Every transaction requires a masterstroke of 
diplomacy, and even when a contract is made, usually 
through the intervention of some Allied Commis- 
sion, it is rarely executed. The broad facts are 
generally realized to-day, but it would be impos- 
sible to complete the enumeration of the endless de- 
tailed disasters which dismemberment has caused. 
The textile industry, for example, was usually so 
subdivided that weaving was carried out in Austria 
and spinning in Bohemia. Both processes are now 
arrested. Again it was the practice to breed and 
rear cattle in the highlands of Austria, but to fatten 
them in plains which have fallen to other States. 
The economic chaos and its consequences in human 



THE POLITICS OF BABEU fe|.s 

misery baffle analysis or 'description?.^ Paris Was 
absorbed in strategy, and knew nothing and cared 
nothing about the human tragedy, the ruin of mil- 
lions, which followed its reckless exercises in map- 
drawing. 

THE BALKANIZATTOK OF EUROPE 

It would be difficult to overstate the evils with 
which this process of Balkanization threatens the 
whole life of Central and Eastern Europe, cultural, 
economic and political. This exaggerated emphasis 
laid on national or racial individuality breeds a 
temper of egoism and isolation. Where it prevails, 
there vanishes all concern for the welfare of man- 
kind beyond the newly-won frontiers. The conse- 
quences are a passion for economic self-sufficiency 
which obstructs the normal processes of exchange, 
and a chauvinism in politics extravagant beyond 
anything in Western experience. The Poles, who 
contrived in the first few weeks of elation which 
followed their liberation to get themselves involved 
in wars with every one of their neighbors — Ger- 
mans, Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians, and Lithuan- 
ians — exhibit the vanity and quarrelsomeness of 
this nationalist temper in its most extravagant form. 
In the world of science and the arts the results will 

■^The "Economic Survey" issued by our Department of 
Overseas Trade (1920), estimates (p. 49) that the industries 
of Austria are now producing less than a quarter of the pre- 
war output. 



46 AFTER THE PEACE 

inevitably be a decline of standards and a lapse 
into provincialism. German culture, whatever be 
its besetting faults, maintained a high level of attain- 
ment and set a broad continental standard of excel- 
lence throughout the Hapsburg Dominions. The 
separated provinces, each cultivating its o-wn idiom, 
and its own consciously emphasized peculiarities, 
will miss the stimulus of a common standard and a 
common language. 

The ethics and the economics of the doctrine of 
" self-determination " have not been thought out to 
their last consequenK:es by Socialists. This doctrine, 
when recklessly stated, is really an inspiration of 
anarchy and individualism. It threatens the dis- 
solution of all the ties of culture and common work 
which bind men of various races together. It in- 
volves the denial, or at least the neglect of all the 
impulses and all the discipline which make for com- 
mon work and co-operation. It promotes the rend- 
ing and dissolution of a civilized life built on cen- 
turies of common effort; it imperils all international 
co-operation. This claim to stand apart in complete 
isolation is a denial of the social ties and duties 
which are broader than the clan-life of a single race. 

The danger is clear. None the less the doctrine 
makes its appeal to deeply rooted sentiments. Most 
of the Socialist parties were before the war in con- 
flict, more or less strenuous and more or less sin- 
cere, with the Imperialist tendencies of their own 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 47 

governments. If the naive egoti$m of the raw strug- 
gling nationaHty has its petty side, the intolerance, 
the insolence, the brutality of Imperialist ruling 
races was, and is, many times more odious and 
more dangerous. Sympathy, as we watched these 
conflicts, led many of us into a sentimental enthus- 
iasm for " little nationalities," as though their small- 
ness were a positive advantage. Englishmen are 
much given to this phase of enthusiasm, though we 
have taken great pains to avoid being ourselves a 
little nationality. It is a clear deduction from any 
honest statement of democratic principles, that any 
people wliich feels itself to be a nationality shall 
enjoy the right to decide freely under what sov- 
ereignty it shall live. The Allies, by their flagrantly 
partial and dishonest application of this principle, 
have not in fact discredited it. On the contrary, 
they have given it, in Ireland especially and in 
Egypt, an energy which it lacked before the war. 
It would be far easier and more natural to apply 
it to Ireland and to Egypt than to these land-locked 
countries of Central Europe, with their desperately 
intermingled populations. As democrats and as 
honest men, we cannot refuse to apply it, where, as 
in Ireland, the demand is passionate, long-lived, and 
all but unanimous. The evils of the brutal use of 
force, both to the ruling and to the subject race, are 
infinitely greater than the losses which nationalist 
separation mayj bring with them. A Socialist 



48 AFTER THE PEACE 

should say to Ireland, " By all means, since you 
insist on it, you shall exercise your right without 
reservations. Decide by constituent assembly or by 
plebiscite, in full liberty, what it is you prefer, 
republican independence or Dominion Home Rule. 
If you choose independence, we shall make no diffi- 
culties." But having said this, he may go on to 
state, as forcibly as he can, the arguments against 
absolute nationalism — the economic risks, the cul- 
tural losses, the danger of militarism, the illusory 
nature of politkal independence for any small peo- 
ple in this dangerous world. He may urge that, in 
spite of gross errors in the past and a disastrous 
historic legacy, two peoples who decide to live to- 
gether with some common ties may, while conced- 
ing to each other self-government in many things, 
lead a richer and fuller life, because in other mat- 
ters they co-operate. 

To a Socialist, the absorbing problem of to-day 
and to-morrow is the economic reconstruction of our 
civilization. How best to eliminate the despotic 
power over other men's lives which privately-owned 
capital gives to a small possessing class; how best 
to organize the self-government of the workers in 
industry, so that the conditions of their daily tasks 
shall evoke in them the spirit of social service and 
the joy of work — if these are our problems, racial 
and national claims cut across them as irrelevancies. 
Everywhere the industrial system creates the same 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 49 

conditions. It talks no national dialect. Yet quar- 
rels based on language, or on obsolete historic mem- 
ories, threaten the unity of the working class and 
distract its mind, wherever national issues obtrude. 
Nationalism becomes the devouring master passion, 
and shatters every attempt to range men of two 
races in one proletarian organization. In Czecho- 
slovakia, for example, the Czech Socialists combine 
in their Parliament not with the German Socialists, 
but with the Czech Agrarians, while the German 
Socialists form a solid block with the middle-class 
parties of their own race. In Poland, the intense 
intolerance of Polish nationalism actually obliges the 
Jewish workmen to organize in separate racial Trade 
Unions. No Socialist will deny the intellectual, 
moral and aesthetic value of any rich and distinct 
national life. No Socialist party has ever wished 
or tried to obliterate or repress the traditions which 
cling to the history, the literature, the language or 
the religion of a nationality. On the contrary, every 
Socialist party worthy of the name has battled for 
tolerance and generosity in these vital, emotional 
things. We do not want a drab and uniform world, 
though of its many colors we would make a har- 
mony. But it is not clear to us that much is gained 
by insisting on associating political authority with 
racial distinctions. That is only to confuse and ob- 
struct the more pressing economic problems. It 
is always possible to concede to every race in a united 



50 AFTER THE PEACE 

territory the utmost liberty and autonomy in schools, 
churches, clubs and associations for its cultural life. 
It is always possible to link up areas, whose popu- 
lations desire local self-government, in a federal 
union. Passion and the legacy of history may make 
complete separation a necessity. We ought never 
to refuse even that, where a people insists upon it 
in cold blood, but it is no part of our doctrine to 
promote or applaud such solutions, whether at home 
or abroad. 

If it had been possible to create a League of 
Nations, so closely knit, especially on its economic 
side, as to be in effect a federal system, this multipli- 
cation of little States might not have been a serious 
evil. Each of them would have lived its life as a 
unit in a greater whole, united for mutual protection 
and interchange. The League, however, as we 
know it to-day, is the faded ghost of a great hope, 
impotent to modify even in the smallest particular 
the enraged egoism of these vehemently separate 
States. The Baltic, Caucasian and Danubian States 
have lost their share in the wider life of ideas and 
economics in the Russian and Hapsburg Empires, 
without gaining anything from this feeble fore- 
shadowing of a world-wide union. In point of fact, 
it is not nationality, but rather Imperialism which 
has gained by this change. As units in a federal 
Republic, these little States would have had a real 
share in the determination of its common affairs. 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL [51 

As it is, they must each submit, with no Court of 
Appeal, to the dictation, mihtary, political and eco- 
nomic, of the greater Allies. Their independence 
is only nominal. Alike in their commercial and in 
their political life, they must obey the lightest sug- 
gestion of the Powers which possess the force or 
the wealth to control their destinies. For this sub- 
servience there is no remedy in the present state 
of the world. If we were to learn that Esthonia 
or Georgia had demanded that a matter in dispute 
with the British Empire should be submitted to arbi- 
tration, the official world would gasp at such audac- 
ity, and if Downing Street agreed to arbitration 
in such a case by a neutral court, some would ask 
if we had really won the war. These little States, 
whose chief possession is a strip of coast, have be- 
come items in British naval policy, useful when we 
please to trade, indispensable when we prefer to 
blockade. The minor continental States dovetail as 
naturally into the military policy of France. They 
have no free share in determining the policy of any 
unit larger than themselves. They have less real 
power of influencing their environment than they 
would have had as members, with voice and vote, 
of federal Austrian and Russian Republics. The 
Balkanization of Central and Eastern Europe has 
meant not the reality of national independence for 
these peoples, but their subjection to Western Im- 
perialism. 



52 AFTER THE PEACE 

This phenomenon of Balkanization seems at first 
sight to mean that nationality has asserted itself as 
a positive and shaping force. On a closer view 
one inclines to regard it rather as a sign of dissolu- 
tion. The war has shaken the fabric of civilization 
on the Continent. The big structures have broken 
down. The elaborate organisms have split into 
their component parts. It is a symptom not of vivid 
and superabundant life, but of decay, retrogression, 
decline. The high complex organism has broken up 
into its elementary cells. Nationalist passion has 
helped the change. It has rent the big organism 
violently asunder, where elsewhere one notes a mere 
nerveless falling apart. But the same phenomenon 
appears, even where there is no racial question. The 
tiny fragment which we call German Austria, 
though it is racially uniform, is only held together 
by the veto of the AlHes on further dissolution. 
One portion, Vorarlberg, has voted for union with 
Switzerland, another, the Tyrol, for annexation to 
Bavaria. The tendency is now to frame a federal 
constitution for German Austria, which leaves only 
a shadowy authority to the Central State. And yet 
the total population of this little State is only six 
millions. Each Austrian province, even each par- 
ish, attempts in economic matters, especially by for- 
bidding the export of food, to exert sovereign au- 
thority. The country defies the town; the town 
would defy the country, were it not that it dreads 



THE POLITICS OF BABEL 53 

starvation. The same particularism on a much 
larger scale shows itself in Germany. The Catholic 
South dreads the more revolutionary North, and the 
Junker East regards " red " Berlin as worse than 
a foreign city. In prosperity great States hold to- 
gether, and a pulsing life of economic and intellec- 
tual exchange can -maintain the most diverse regions 
in unity. Adversity brings dissolution. When 
trade stagnates, when thought is busied only with 
the intolerable misery, when the daily bread is al- 
ways measured and sometimes missed, the circle of 
men-s interests and sympathies contracts. Each 
province, each town, even each village, thinks only 
of itself, and resents so bitterly the thought of part- 
ing with anything it possesses, that it will hardly 
exchange even its superfluities. It closes its gates, 
and the parish boundary becomes a veritable fron- 
tier. An elementary instinct of self-preservation 
expresses itself as^ parochial selfishness. The clan, 
the parish, the race assert themselves against the 
wider national and international life. So far from 
rejoicing at the riot of nationalism and particu- 
larism in Europe, as though it were a movement of 
vigorous life towards liberty, we ought rather to 
see in it the unmistakable symptom of decay. The 
politics of the Tower of Babel means a return to a 
poverty-stricken and elementary existence, a weak- 
ening of constructive and creative power, a decline 
in civilization. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 

The war left in Europe only three Great Powers 
which retained the ability to act independently be- 
yond their frontiers : of the three, only Great Brit- 
ain combines a relatively sound economic structure 
with adequate military and naval force. The Peace 
Treaties made a European system which could be 
controlled, if at all, only by a great military Alli- 
ance, vigilant, permanent, united and indefatigible. 
In the world made by these Treaties a League of Na- 
tions can have no moral reality and only the most 
modest of functions. The need for force in the 
relationship of peoples is in inverse ratio to their 
contentment. Where there are unsatisfied ambi- 
tions, there will be armaments. When half a con- 
tinent feels that the terms dictated to it are not 
merely an offense to its self-respect, but are barely 
compatible with its physical survival, it is plain that 
the settlement can in the long run be enforced only 
by maintaining in the hands of the victors an irre- 
sistible police. A League of Nations worthy of the 
name could have been created only as the frame- 

54 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 55 

work and expression of a settlement which had won 
the general assent of civilization. Contentment in 
the literal sense may be an unattainable ideal. Any 
settlement which assured the future must have im- 
posed sacrifices on the vanquished. Some territo- 
rial rearrangements were necessary and right. 
Poland had to be" reconstituted. Alsace could not 
have been left, against its desire, within the German 
Empire, .though a plebiscite ought to have been ac- 
corded. Hungary, though the actual dismember- 
ment is excessive, could not have been left to tyran- 
nize over a subject population as numerous as her 
own. Disarmament was indispensable, though it 
ought not to have been one-sided. A contribution 
from Germany to repair the devastation in France 
was required by equity and humanity. None of 
these things would have been a barrier to a lasting 
settlement, and even in Germany a great part, per- 
haps a majority of the population, would have ad- 
mitted their justice. These Treaties, however, are 
so packed with flagrant injustice, so plainly dic- 
tated by strategical ambition and economic greed, 
that they can evoke no moral assent. More fatal 
by far than their remoteness from the moral stand- 
ards professed by the victors is their disastrous eco- 
nomic effect. Half a Continent has been deprived 
of hope, resources, ambition and the possibility of 
work, and confronted with the prospect that it will 
either fail to maintain its population on a civilized 



56 AFTER THE PEACE 

level of comfort, or else acquiesce for a generation 
in devoting all the energy that can be spared from 
the struggle to win its daily bread, to the task of 
pouring wealth into the coffers of its conquerors. 
Treaties which make an oppression that is felt in 
every home, at every family meal, in every school, 
which reduce millions of men to helpless penury and 
degradation, can be maintained, if at all, only by 
overwhelming force. It is idle, while the Treaties 
are maintained, to talk of substituting the League 
of Nations for the alliance of the victors. No 
League in which neutrals and the vanquished were 
fairly represented could or would consent to en- 
force these Treaties. The only power which can 
or will enforce them is an irresistible military al- 
liance of governments which believe that they have 
an interest in maintaining them. While this alli- 
ance dominates the world, the League can be only its 
shadow, its tool, its creature, whose action will be 
tolerated only in directions and within limits, which 
leave the governing authority of the Alliance unim- 
paired. The liberal idealism which found its com- 
pensation for the misery and cruelty of the war in 
the creation of a league of peace was misled at 
Versailles into a fatal and irremediable error of tac- 
tics. Mr. Wilson, Lord Robert Cecil and General 
Smuts seem to have believed that if they could but 
create the League, the iniquities of the Treaties could 
be gradually reformed away. The history of Ver- 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER '57 

sailles is that of a compromise, in which one party 
purchased the empty success of creating a pacific 
League, while the other party made a world which 
can be governed, if at all, only by brute force. The 
Liberals were doomed to defeat from the first day. 
A dictated settlement can inaugurate nothing but an 
era of international coercion. 

If the Allies do eventually admit our late enemies 
to the League, they must safeguard their settlement 
by denying to the League any real power to modify 
it. By what expedients they achieve this result is 
a question only of tactics. Some of the expedients 
are apparent in the Covenant of the League itself. 
Its Council can do nothing unless it is unanimous, 
nor can the Assembly do much without the assent 
of the Council. That in itself is enough to perpet- 
uate the settlement of Versailles. We have a World 
Parliament, but it meets under a handicap compar- 
able only to the fantastic liberum veto of the crazy 
Polish Monarchy. If any one of the victors can 
block any proposal for amendment, it is a mockery 
to create a Council. 

BRITISH SEA-POWER 

A glance at the real balance of power in the 
world suflfices to demonstrate the impotence of the 
League, if we regard it as an independent body, 
which ought to be free on occasion to take and 
enforce some decision which might be unwelcome to 



58 AFTER THE PEACE 

one or more of the chief Alhes. It is hard to see 
how either the Council or the Assembly could con- 
ceivably reach such a decision, as they are consti- 
tuted to-day. If they were to reach it, they could 
not enforce it. One-sided disarmament has left the 
chief Allies omnipotent. We resisted the Ameri- 
can doctrine of the *' freedom of the seas," for the 
avowed reason that our right to the utmost use of 
the weapon of the blockade must remain unim- 
paired. Our hands are free, in any dispute of ouf 
own, which the League had failed to adjust, to make 
the maximum use of this terrific weapon. We could 
use it now with vastly greater effect than during 
the war, for the navy of our late enemies has ceased 
to exist. We are, moreover, established now within 
the Baltic. The only legal check, which exists to an 
unlimited British blockade, is that the Turkish 
Treaty provides against the closing of the Bosphorus 
and Dardanelles, save by a decision of the League 
of Nations. Even this provision, however, is worth 
very little, for the police of the Straits is confided 
to the Allies, and not to the League. In actual 
fact, the Turkish Straits are almost as completely 
under British control as the Suez Canal itself. The 
failure of America to impose any check whatever 
upon our naval power must count among the two 
or three decisive and permanent results of the Peace 
Conference. 
The whole Continent now lives under the shadow 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 59 

of our sea-power, and must reckon with it, as men 
reckon with the seasons, as one of the unalterable 
conditions of their political and economic life. The 
memory of what our blockade achieved will last, 
while any of the children are alive who saw the 
war. It has left its mark more permanently than 
any local devastation. The hand of man will in a 
few years cover up the vandal work which Luden- 
dorff wrought in the Northern Departments of 
France, but for half a century to come, the stunted, 
rickety and tuberculous children of the blockade 
years will carry in their bodies a reminder of our 
power. Henceforward the lightest threat to block- 
ade will suffice to impose our will on the Continent, 
and whole populations must reckon with it in all they 
plan. 

Naval power, acting through the blockade, is 
perhaps a worse menace to the freedom of weaker 
states than military power. It can be used with 
relative impunity by the stronger. A certain sen- 
timent against risking the lives of our own soldiers 
will always be a restraint, though a weak one, 
against land wars. But a blockade costs little or 
nothing in life to ourselves. So strangely partial 
is our thinking, that many kindly people even re- 
gard it as a relatively humane form of coercion or 
self-assertion. It is bloodless, and there are those 
who would think it a crime to cause a few hundred 
deaths by shooting, but lack the imagination to 



6o AFTER THE PEACE 

realize the suffering under starvation, typhus, rickets 
and tuberculosis of the millions of a blockaded pop- 
ulation. The blockade is for a naval Empire a 
cheap method of wielding power. It costs us little 
in blood or money. That means that Governments 
may make use of it, lightly, even recklessly, with 
little check either from humane opinion or from 
the taxpayer's prudence. The blockade is a subtle 
instrument, which has solved Shylock's problem of 
taking the pound of flesh without shedding Chris- 
tian blood. Nor does it touch the Christian con- 
science. We are like those bishops of the Middle 
Ages, who would ride into battle armed with mace 
but not with sword. Bloodshed is abhorrent, and 
given the ships, it is also unnecessary. 

FRENCH MILITARY POLICY 

On land the corresponding fact is the military 
ascendancy of France. She alone combines im- 
mense military power with a relative economic self- 
sufficiency. Italy, with a much smaller and less effi- 
cient army, is lamed for independent action by her 
dependence on imported coal and grain. She can- 
not act without Allies who will supply her with these 
essentials. Few of us realize that the relative mili- 
tary power of France is now vastly greater than 
that of Germany ever was. She has disarmed her 
chief antagonist, forbidden to him the manufacture 
of heavy artillery, fighting air-craft or tanks, occu- 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 6i 

pied his western provinces and dismantled his fort- 
resses. He is helpless not merely for aggression 
but even for defense. This disparity will be per- 
manent, for to the late enemies of France, and to 
them alone, the instrument of a national army is 
denied. She retains, however, conscription, and so 
also do the satellites who move in her orbit — 
Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Roumania, and Jugo- 
slavia. France has recovered the military predom- 
inance which she enjoyed under the first Napoleon, 
and in broad outline the strategical politics of Mar- 
shal Foch revive Napoleonic tradition. The Polish 
army is trained and organized by a French " mis- 
sion," which is said to number 600 officers. War- 
saw is once more "an outpost of France upon the 
Vistula." 

M. Clemenceau did not realize the full ambition 
of M. Pbincare, recorded in the Secret Treaty with 
Russia, for the recognition of the Rhine as the 
" natural frontier " of France. He did, however, 
secure for fifteen years the possession of the Saar 
Valley, and the permanent ownership of its coal- 
mines. He also secured the military occupation 
for the same period of the Southern Rhine pro- 
vinces, and M. Millerand has officially declared that 
any infraction of the Treaty (and its literal fulfil- 
ment is impossible) will entitle France to prolong 
the occupation even beyond these fifteen years. 
With these securities the predominant military and 



62 AFTER THE PEACE 

political opinion in France is not yet satisfied. By 
agitation in Paris, and by intrigue in the cities of 
the Rhine, France is openly working for the perma- 
nent dismemberment of Germany, and it is the re- 
solve of her politicians and soldiers in some way to 
prevent the restoration of the Rhine provinces to 
the Fatherland. In the Note sent from San Remo, 
the Supreme Council threatened the occupation of 
further districts of Germany should any part of the 
Treaty remain unfulfilled. The plan seems to be: 
first, to occupy the coal-field of the Ruhr, the 
densely-peopled " black country '* round Essen, and 
then to use it as a lure with which to carry the 
dismemberment of Germany still further. The 
whole economic life of Germany depends on the 
two great coal-fields of the Ruhr and Silesia, and 
both of them may be cut off. The result would be 
the total industrial ruin of what remained. It 
would then be easy to play on the separatist tenden- 
cies which exist in Bavaria and the south. *' Re- 
main in the German Reich '' ( so the argument would 
run), "and you will starve, linked to the corpse of 
Prussia. Break away, declare your independence, 
place yourself under the protection of France, and 
you shall be amply provisioned with Ruhr coal." 
The sentiment of national and racial solidarity 
among the Germans is probably stronger than the 
French suppose. This policy, none the less, might 
succeed for a time, and result in a temporary sepa- 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 63 

ration of the Rhine provinces and the south from 
Prussia. The prevalent view in our own country 
is still that Prussia is the home of reaction, while 
Bavaria is more ** liberal.'* That is wholly untrue. 
Prussia is the more thoroughly industrialized half of 
Germany. The Ruhr, Berlin and the Saxon black 
country are the strongholds of Socialism, and espe- 
cially of the Independents. The class struggle is 
sharper than elsewhere, but if we exclude the re- 
mote agricultural north and north-east, where the 
Junker squirearchy is still supreme, Prussia, since 
the fall of the Hohenzollerns, belongs predomi- 
nantly to the advanced parties. Not so Bavaria. 
Outside its large towns, the countryside is clerical. 
It is well armed, and its governing passion is a 
dread, not of the Prussian reaction, but of the Prus- 
sian revolution. French diplomacy has always been 
skilful in its dealings with clericalism. If Bavaria 
should break away, Austria, in spite of its strong 
Socialist party, will probably be allowed and en- 
couraged by the French to unite with it, and it is 
even possible that Monarchy may be restored. This 
South German State would live by a measure of 
French patronage, much as its ancestors did under 
Napoleon. 

BRITISH AND FRENCH ARMS 

It is for us a standing puzzle to guess what 
French policy on the Continent really is. We re- 



64 AFTER THE PEACE 

peat to ourselves that our Allies are a logical people, 
and yet they appear to follow incompatible aims. 
They seem at times to desire the total ruin of Ger- 
many, both in the industrial and in the military 
sense, and, indeed, in the modern world, these two 
aspects of power can hardly be separated. On the 
other hand, they seem to believe that from this 
ruined land they can extort a fabulous indemnity. 
They hunt for that indemnity among the ruins, as 
some one has said, much as mediaeval alchemists 
hunted for the philosopher's stone. Their finance 
is built on that expectation, and if it is not fulfilled, 
they, too, must face ruin. To some extent they 
may be the victims of mental confusion, and of in- 
compatible ambitions, among which they will not 
select what is realizable. There are, however, other 
possible explanations. If they can anticipate the 
indemnity by the proceeds of an International Loan, 
guaranteed mainly by Great Britain, they can afford 
to be indifferent to the question whether Germany 
can or will pay, for the loss by her default would 
fall in that case primarily on us. Again, if Ger- 
man unity were once broken, the French might con- 
sent to revise thpr policy. They would allow the 
Catholic west and south to recover, and recoup 
themselves by exploiting it discreetly and not too 
harshly. Prussia, indeed, would be ruined, but she 
would sink to the position of a third-rate agricul- 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 65 

tural State, and her resentment might be ignored as 
a practical danger. 

Our own peculiar brand of Imperialism is written 
all over these Treaties. We have made ourselves 
all-powerful at sea. We have confiscated the mer- 
cantile marine of Germany. We have suppressed, 
or taken power to suppress, all the branches of her 
industrial and commercial enterprises and businesses 
which competed with our own outside her borders. 
No part of our policy during or after the war was 
pursued with such thoroughness. Everywhere 
within the AUied world German businesses, banks 
and agencies were closed down and liquidated, so 
that when at length peace did bring the theoretical 
possibility of trading, Germany had to start again 
from the beginning, without connections or open- 
ings. The same course was followed also in Africa, 
where all the wharves, warehouses and transport 
material of enemy firms were sold by auction to 
their competitors. Towards the end of the war, 
certain of the remoter neutral States, like China 
and Brazil, were brought into our camp as Allies, 
though it was never suggested that they should con- 
tribute a ship or a battalion to our fighting forces. 
One of the prime objects of this curious maneuver 
was that in these States, also, the process of uproot- 
ing German commerce could be completed by 
methods possible only in a state of war. Here also 



66 AFTER THE PEACE 

German businesses were liquidated, and from 
China the numerous colony of German residents 
was expelled. The Peace Treaties put the coping- 
stone on all this preparatory work. They con- 
tained none of the clauses establishing legal and 
commercial reciprocity usual in all the Treaties 
which have terminated former wars. They secured 
for Allied trade and traders in Germany every con- 
ceivable right and privilege to reside, to acquire 
property, to use rivers and railways at the lowest 
rates, to fly into or over the country, and to enjoy 
the status of the " most favored nation " in all tariff 
regulations. Not a word suggested that any of 
these rights were to be mutual. The state of peace 
has not automatically brought back to the German 
traders any of the usual rights enjoyed in foreign 
countries by the subjects of every civilized state. 
In China, the usual Customs tariff applicable to the 
goods of all European States alike has been denied 
to them. Nor is this all. It remained to acquire 
their enterprises and concessions, railways, oil-wells 
and the like, in Turkey, Russia and China. That is 
provided for in the Treaty (Article 260). Finally, 
as an item in the indemnity, their businesses, even in 
neutral countries, may be liquidated for the benefit 
of the Allies (Article 235). All this was rather a 
British than a French policy. It solved the prob- 
lem for a modern capitalist Power, of making war 
a profitable enterprise, at all events for the possess- 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER (>J 

ing classes. A measurable number of millions, the 
greater part of the profits of German overseas trade, 
has by these various expedients been added to the 
national income of the British Empire. Our chief 
competitor in world-trade has vanished as a com- 
petitor from every port and from every market in 
China, South America, Africa and Turkey. Apart 
from our acquisition of her African colonies and of 
Mesopotamia, with its oil, our gain from conquest 
is mainly indirect. We reckon on adding the profits 
of this once thriving German world-trade to our 
own, and should Germany again begin to work and 
export, a substantial portion of the profits of this 
new trade will, infallibly, go to us as shippers, 
bankers and middlemen. This is a form of indem- 
nity which may be more profitable to ourselves and 
more crippling to the enemy than the money tribute 
which the French desire. But it implies a certain 
degree of energy, enterprise and commercial expe- 
rience in the Power which profits by it. Our men- 
tality is that of the merchant and the manufacturer. 
We prize, especially, the opportunities for future 
trading gains. We are trying, for example, to ac- 
quire as part of our share in the indemnity, the large 
and admirably managed businesses of the German 
Electrical Companies in South America. Whereas we 
take a business and mean to run it, the French de- 
sire a tribute in hard cash. That is the mentality 
of the rentier, the man who lives on the interest of 



68 AFTER THE PEACE 

capital, whether it be his savings, his inheritance, 
or the fruits of victory. France has never been a 
country of great businesses working for a world- 
market. Her most valuable exports are articles of 
luxury, into which taste and skill enter as the chief 
ingredients. Hers is a society based on small busi- 
nesses, small farms, small properties, to be handed 
down from generation to generation with small in- 
crements to small families. We visualize wealth as 
the possession of a big and expanding business. 
The French visualize it rather as the possession of 
share certificates and title-deeds, which bring in their 
punctual interest. The two national characters are 
built upon this broad economic difference. Our 
temperament is the more adventurous. Theirs 
seems to us somewhat narrow and grasping. We 
seem fated to misunderstand each other, whenever 
we face an economic problem together. Take, for 
example, the attitude of the two business worlds to- 
wards Soviet Russia. Ours, on the whole, would 
cut its losses and start trading again. The French 
see no " opening," and cannot look beyond the fact 
that Moscow has a store of gold, which might be 
captured and used to pay some of the interest on 
the repudiated debt. Our attitude, given our 
energy, is the more reasonable and far-sighted, but 
in its way it is not less acquisitive than the '' grasp- 
ing" policy of capitalist France. Englishmen and 
Frenchmen look at each other and turn away dis- 



' THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 69 

pleased. What each sees mirrored in the other face 
is the soul of an acquisitive capitalist society. 

These two divergent policies are at the root of 
the fatal dualism of Allied policy towards Ger- 
many. We were not a whit more humane or gen- 
erous towards the beaten foe. Indeed, we com- 
pleted his commercial ruin with masterly thorough- 
ness. When once we have destroyed his power of 
earning and trading, however, we have the sense 
to realize, for the most part, that he cannot pay also 
a huge indemnity, measured in thousands of millions 
sterling. We can afford to be " philosophical '' 
about it. We have got our indirect gain by destroy- 
ing his competition. That, however, is small con- 
solation to' the French. Their industry, their na- 
tional character and economy are not so built that 
they can profit by this occasion. It is we, not they, 
who will step into Geriman shoes in the Chinese, Afri- 
can and South American markets. Accordingly, 
the French must needs demand the cash indemnity 
also. That annoys us. We know it is unobtain- 
able. We have stripped the enemy so bare that he 
cannot now earn an indemnity for the French. In 
private conversation, if not in print, we speak of 
their insanely grasping temper, and they retort, with 
less reserve, by references to our celebrated egoism. 
Both reproaches are true. Our mercantile capital- 
ism and their financial capitalism, each predatory, 
each egoistic, but in very different ways, have com- 



70 AFTER THE PEACE 

bined to make a settlement which is a nightmare of 
economic lunacy. If we incline now to bestride the 
fallen foe to protect him from French greed, let 
US not forget that it was we, by our protracted 
blockade and our merciless ruin of his commerce, 
who made him the starved, resourceless, insolvent 
debtor, from whom France can extract nothing fur- 
ther. Between us, we have taken his tools, a thing 
the common law forbids. Without his ships, his 
cranes, his harbor dredgers, his locomotives, his coal 
and his iron ore, how can he work to fill the French 
exchequer ? 

From this digression on the indemnity, let us re- 
turn to the peculiar and distinctive characters of the 
two allied brands of militarism. Ours works by 
the naval arm, with the conquest of world-trade for 
its primary aim. French militarism, on tlie other 
hand, seems to return to the Napoleonic pattern, and 
is concerned mainly in exacting a tribute, which will 
be paid, year by year, for five-and-thirty years to 
come. The sanction, the compelling force behind 
this tribute is the French army, planted on German 
soil, and closing round it by means of the " barbed 
wire " entanglement of its minor Central European 
Allies, each armed, munitioned and instructed from 
French arsenals and French military schools. The 
image of the future which presents itself is that of 
all Central Europe reduced to the condition of a; 
camp of prisoners of war, kept at work for the 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 71 

benefit of their gaolers, by a system of calculated 
intimidation. At any moment, for any defect in the 
fulfillment of impossible demands, the French army 
may roll onwards and occupy y^t other German 
towns and coal-fields. The French envisage victory 
as an investment. The capital of blood is to yield 
its yearly percentage. The mind of the financier 
shapes this militarism, as the mind of the merchant 
shapes ours. 

We have our labor-saving device, the blockade, 
which spares us the fatigues and risks of invasion. 
The French have their analogous invention. They 
wage war by proxy. The Poles fill this part in 
their war on Soviet Russia. The negroes are the 
selected force for the coercion of Germany. Mili- 
tarism is a risky tool. At the end of the war there 
was no white population willing to endure indefi- 
nitely the fatigues of fresh campaigns. The muti- 
nies in the French fleet and land forces at Odessa 
were a warning that the Republic must be sparing 
in its future use of white troops. They might re- 
fuse service, and, what is worse, they might even 
be won by Bolshevik propaganda. From any dan- 
ger of that kind these black troops are immune, for 
many of them are drawn from the most primitive 
tribes of Central Africa, which practiced cannibal- 
ism in recent years, if they have even now abandoned 
it. These negro troops are as automatic as a ma- 
chine gun and as little likely to be demoralized by 



^2 AFTER THE PEACE 

sympathy. Their known barbarity towards men and 
their appetites towards women add the effect of 
terror to their unquestionable bravery. No Power 
could desire a more serviceable arm for any pur- 
pose of coercion, and there are no electors in Africa 
who will resent their absence in sunless climates on 
distant fronts. It was, even before the war, the 
design of the French General Staff to supplement 
its white recruits by these black levies. There are 
now in force decrees which establish conscription in 
all the colonies of French Africa, and the intention 
is to employ these black troops during two of their 
three years of service outside their own Continent.^ 
One hardly knows which aspect of their policy is 
the more sinister. It is a menace and an affront to 
civilization in Europe, and, above all, a threat to 
Socialism. It means from the African standpoint 
a reversion to the morals and methods of the slave 
trade, for no tradition of patriotism can possibly 
reconcile these men to the prospect of fighting under 
constraint for their white conquerors. When the 
Allies decided to deprive Germany of her African 
colonies, one of their loudly-professed reasons was 
that they desired to save that continent from mili- 
tarism. That was always a hypocritical reason, for 
long before the end of the war, the Germen Colonial 

1 According to an answer to a question in Parliament (^see 
the Times, 17th June, 1920), France has at present 660,000 
men of all ranks under arms, of whom 190,000 are colored 
troops. 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 73 

Minister, Dr. Solf, had proposed an international 
agreement to prohibit the recruiting of Africans, 
gave for purposes of local police. France has begun 
the systematic militarization of Africa, and other 
Powers will probably follow her example. The 
pasting of Senegalese sentries in Goethe's house at 
Frankfort was a symbolic act which revealed the 
indifference of this new militarism to all the finer 
values of European culture. 

THE RULE OF THE ALLIES 

With these aims and with these instruments of 
coercion, the military Alliance of Great Britain and 
France ha? constituted itself the governing power 
throughout the old world. The big Empires which 
might have withstood it are shattered, and over the 
fragmentary multitude of little States which have 
replaced them, it endeavors to hold sway. The in- 
tention is, as Mr. Lloyd George has told Parlia- 
ment, to make the Supreme Council of the Alliance a 
permanent institution. Every international ques- 
tion of any consequence depends on its decision, 
and the League of Nations is permitted to handle 
only such questions as the Allied Supreme Council 
is pleased to refer to it. The Council of the League 
has developed neither will nor initiative nor ambi- 
tion of its own, nor is it ever likely to do so, while 
it is composed only of delegates named for each 
meeting by the Cabinets of the Allies. The one 



74 AFTER THE PEACE 

neutral, Spain, which has a seat on the Council, was 
evidently chosen by the Allies because she is the 
least likely to forward any disinterested or humane 
policy which might be inconvenient to them. 

The fatal objection to the Allied Council is not 
merely that it represents only the victors in the late 
war, and only three of them. The main objection 
to it is that it is composed of men who could only 
by a miracle take a disinterested and impartial view 
of the questions which come before them for deci- 
sion. The Prime Ministers of Great Britain, France 
and Italy are men whose daily thoughts are neces- 
sarily and properly busied with the interests of 
their own countries. Can men who must be en- 
gaged every hour of every day in promoting the 
economic and strategic aggrandisement of these three 
Powers, divest themselves of these preoccupations, 
and assume the quasi-judicial impartiality without 
which an International Council would be a mock- 
ery? ^ The feat would be impossible. In point of 
fact the Supreme Allied Council works on the lines 
of a geographical division of interests usual between 
Allies. That always was the accepted convention, 

iThe Executive Council of the League is open to the same 
objection. If ever it is possible to make the League a reality, 
two constitutional changes seem essential: (i) The Assembly- 
should be an International Parliament, indirectly elected from 
the national Chambers by proportional representation; (2) A 
Political Council, elected by the Assembly, should be created 
to deal with all disputes. The present Executive might re- 
main to devise action when recommended by this Council. 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 75 

both in pre-war Europe and during the war. Each 
Empire has its more or less clearly recognized zone 
of expansion, penetration and influence, and a good 
Ally will not interfere with a colleague so long as 
these lines of demarcation are observed. The classi- 
cal example of this recognition of zones is to be 
found in the arrangement between Russia and the 
Western Allies, which was embodied in the famous 
Secret Agreements concluded on the eve of the fall 
of Tsardom. France obtained the assent of Russia 
to her plan for creating a buffer State under French 
protection out of the German territory on the left 
bank of the Rhine. In return the right of the Tsar 
was recognized to dispose as he pleased of Poland, 
and of the Eastern frontier generally.^ 

Arrangements of this type render any working 
of disinterested opinion impossible. That is indeed 
their object. The egoism of the interested Power 
is given free scope, and each party to the Alliance 
condones the aggrandizement of the other, in re- 
turn for an equal license for itself. The whole 
comity of expansive Empires rests, and always has 
rested, on this foundation. What agreement's of 
this type, tacit or explicit, there may be among the 
Allies to-day, one can only guess. When the Pre- 
miers meet in the Supreme Council with many items 
of business before them, the process of decision is 

1 See The Secret Treaties, by F. Seymour Cocks, p. 6y, 
National Labor Press. 



^6 AFTER THE PEACE 

inevitably one of barter. There can be, in such a 
secret Council, which exists primarily to adjust the 
clashing interests of the chief Allies, no broad con- 
sideration of the general good, and no effective 
checking of the egoism of one Ally by its fellows. 
This is the fundamental vice of all Alliances. So 
long as one Ally has need of the other, it cannot 
adopt the pose of the stern moral censor. We were 
officially blind, during the existence of the pre-war 
Entente, to all the misdeeds of Tsarist Russia. If 
we, or even more obviously the French, require 
Poland as a " barrier " against Russia and Ger- 
many, we cannot afford to take the Polish oppres- 
sion of the Jews too tragically. What one asks of 
an Ally is bayonets, not virtue. 

That the ascendancy of the Alliance over the 
League of Nations is intended to be permanent, a 
glance at the latest of the Peace Treaties will show. 
The Turkish Treaty is in many ways the worst and 
the most absurd of the series. The whole of Turk- 
ish Turkey is in armed revolt against it, and it can 
be enforced, if at all, as Signor Nitti said, only by 
another war, for which the major Allies lack the 
will and the means. It outrages nationality by 
extending Greek dominion over regions, especially 
Western Thrace and the Hinterland of Smyrna, 
which have been proved by the recent investigations 
of allied officials to contain only minorities of 
Greeks. It forces Britain and France as manda- 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 'jy 



toiy Powers on the protesting and " rebellious " 
peoples of Mesopotamia and Syria, though the 
Covenant promised that the wishes of the population 
should be a " principal consideration " in assigning 
mandates. It fails to provide a protector for the 
Armenians, who call for one in their dire peril. It 
rashly affronts Moslem sentiment, yet it fails to give 
effect to Christian sympathy with the most pitiable 
of all the victims of the Turks. Finally, it reveals 
how little real part the Allies intend to concede to 
the League of Nations. The three chief Allies and 
not the League will police the Turkish Straits. It 
is again these same three Allies who are to control 
the entire finance of Turkey, through a permanent 
Commission. The Commission, if the Treaty could 
ever be enforced, would govern Turkey even in its 
internal affairs, as absolutely as the British control 
governed Egypt before the war. No Budget can be 
valid, no tax or duty levied, without its assent. 
There was much to be said for the principle of plac- 
ing Turkey, at least for a term of years, under some 
form of international control. The attraction of 
that idea lay, however, in the assumption that this 
control would be disinterested. H-ere, however, is 
a proposal to vest the Government of Turkey in 
the hands of the three Powers who are openly carv- 
ing it into zones for economic exploitation. We 
divide with France the oil of Mesopotamia. Italy 
shares ®;ith France the coal of Eregli, and marks 



78 AFTER THE PEACE 

off her economic zone in Adalia. All three take 
over the interests and concessions which German 
enterprise had acquired. Financial control by 
Powers who start by affirming these claims, can 
mean only exploitation. 

It wanted only the incident of the Polish war on 
Russia to complete the proof that a League of Na- 
tions, while it languishes in the shadow of a great 
military Alliance, cannot perform the functions for 
which it was created. To define the League as an 
organization to avert wars, would be to limit its 
purpose too narrowly. If it were no more than 
that, it would be much less. Only in so far as it 
makes itself necessary in peace, will it be obeyed in 
war. It ought to permeate all our international life, 
not merely to avert mischiefs, but to confer bene- 
fits. Its most obvious duty, as the Labor Party 
urged from the start, should have been to ration 
raw materials among industrial peoples according to 
their needs. These seem to-day high and remote am- 
bitions, and it requires an effort even to recall the fact 
that the League was founded primarily to make an 
end of wars. Even that elementary function it can- 
not perform. One need not pause to argue that the 
Polish attack on Russia was a wanton aggression, 
inspired by insane ambitions. That is irrelevant. 
The fact which concerned the League was that this 
war, arrested during the winter by a secret armistice, 
broke out again in the spring after the amplest 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 79 

warnings. It was no little war. Poland had over 
half a million men in the field. Each belligerent was 
bankrupt and half -starved. They were fighting over 
territory repeatedly devastated by war and civil war, 
by revolution and pogroms. There were, according 
to the Director of the American Red Cross, a quarter 
of a million cases of hunger-typhus on the Polish side 
(not to reckon the other) of the fighting line. Yet, 
in reply to the appeal of Lord Robert Cecil, Lord 
Curzon formally refused to set the machinery of 
the League of Nations in motion either to prevent 
or check this war. " Any war or threat of war," 
so runs the eleventh Article of the Covenant, " is 
hereby declared a matter of concern to the whole 
League," which must " take any action that may be 
deemed wise and effective to safeguard the peace 
of nations." One need not discuss the riddle why 
in this case the League took no such action. We 
were supplying the Poles with munitions and France 
was sending guns and instructors. Naturally, 
Powers which as Allies allow a war to break out and 
back the aggressor with material aid, cannot, as 
Members of the League, use the League to stop it. 
The League in such matters will be used or ignored 
as the interests and calculations of the Allies dictate. 
But even if the League had acted, and acted 
promptly, could a Council composed of oflficial 
persons, who with one exception are bound in duty 
to regard Poland as an Ally, conceivably render 



8o AFTER THE PEACE 

an impartial judgment in a dispute between this 
Ally and Russia? There can be no League while 
the Alliance endures. 

THE FUTURE OF THE ALLIANCE 

To speculate on the future of the Alliance would 
involve a risky essay in prophecy. The intention 
to maintain it as the groundwork of European 
polity is loudly proclaimed, but plainly it works un- 
comfortably. The dissensions between London and 
Paris over the German indemnity, the Turkish 
Treaty and our relation to Russia, are matters of 
public knowledge and daily comment. Italy, in 
dread of bankruptcy and revolution, with bittqr 
grievances against both the stronger Allies, openly 
preparing a rapprochement with Germany and 
Austria, and turning in her complete disillusionment 
to the Statesman who would have kept her neutral 
in the war, has morally seceded from the Alliance. 
By naming Signor Giolitti her Premier, she has sent 
in her resignation as a victor. The Alliance rests 
now on the fragile tie of interest and fear which 
still in some measure unites the Governments of 
Britain and France. Its power wanes visibly. 
The minor Allies quarrel among themselves, and no 
effective central command imposes its authority upon 
them. Half Europe has been Balkanized, but Paris 
and London cannot exert in Central and Eastern 
Europe the authority which Berlin, Vienna and 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 8i 

Petersburg used to wield. This Continent, with a 
civiHzation that has lost its nerve centers, falls vis- 
ibly apart into anarchic fragments. The power of 
the Alliance wanes with its unity. It has drafted a 
settlement which it lacks the force to impose. 

One may reckon, indeed, on a change of spirit at 
the centers. Unfortunately, such changes proceed 
at very uneven paces. They are apt to follow eco- 
nomic decline, and when that is evident, the power 
of action is lost. Italy returns to a sort of furious 
sanity, but only to find that the danger which has 
made her sane has robbed her of the power to wield 
an influence. British opinion veers also, though 
with more deliberation. But in France a change 
seems of all desirable things the least likely. Her 
partial eclipse during the fifty years that followed 
Sedan has obliterated our recollection of the per- 
sistent military tradition of this most nationalist of 
peoples. We are apt to forget that, in spite of 
Republican forms, a nation of small peasant owners 
and small investors never will be Liberal in the Brit- 
ish sense of the word. The brilliance of the mur- 
dered Jaures led us to overestimate the power of 
French Socialism. The folly with which the French 
Trade Unions were led in the recent general strike, 
and the ease with which they were crushed, warn us 
that the industrial proletariat is much too weak to 
reverse or even to moderate the policy of the govern- 
ing class, while in numbers it must always be out- 



82 AFTER THE PEACE 

voted by the rural population. The significant fact 
about the Parliamentary life of France is, that since 
the fall of M. Caillaux, such opposition as there has 
been, first to M. Clemenceau and then to M. Mille- 
rand, came from experienced opportunist politicians, 
who felt or affected an even more ardent and reck- 
less nationalism than theirs. From M. Poincare, 
M. Briand, and M. Barthou among the older men, to 
M. Franklin-Bouillon among the aspirants, every 
politician out of office has criticized the Government, 
not for its exacting and selfish policy, but for its 
weakness in imposing its will, now on its Allies 
and again on its enemies. The opposite phenome- 
non prevails in England. A return to moderation 
under these conditions is not easy to foresee. No 
French Government dare face the tax-payer with 
the news that he must pay the war-bill. Direct tax- 
ation, even the mildest, is a barely tolerated novelty 
in France. Our propertied class gains largely and 
spends largely, in the belief that it will easily replace 
what it has to disburse. It endures high taxation 
with comparative good-will. That is also true of 
the Germans. It is the industrial habit of mind. 
The French amass with difficulty and spend with 
care. Taxation causes them a sort of physical pain. 
The French will not modify their European policy 
without further pertinacious efforts to impose their 
tribute by violence. 

When at length the Alliance breaks, or ceases to 



THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER 83 

have more than a normal existence, can the League 
of Nations replace it? There is much truth in the 
contention of British Ministers that the League, can- 
not in the present state of the world '' act effec- 
tively." The reason, however, is not its youth and 
immaturity. The reason is that the League could 
not administer these Treaties. It would have to 
begin by revising the Treaties so drastically that 
nothing of their spirit remained. That, however, 
involves either the ability to command, which the 
Allies possessed in the first month of victory, or 
else a unanimous spirit of reasonableness in Europe. 
Under this Covenant one dissentient on the Council 
of the League could veto any change, and even were 
the Council unanimous, it would not be easy to 
coerce even the minor Allies. Europe had a brief 
Liberal movement when Mr. Wilson first arrived 
in Paris. That chance has gone, and it may not 
return. Nor is it probable, even if America should 
eventually enter the League, that she will do so with- 
out reservations that undermine it. Her objection 
is precisely to its governing, authoritative aspect. 
The Covenant was far from setting up anything 
which could be regarded as a world-government, or 
even as the nucleus of a federal constitution. But 
weak as the Covenant is in this respect, it claims 
much more authority than American sentiment will 
brook. Dictatorial powers for the League would 
have been unnecessary had the settlement itself 



84 AFTER THE PEACE 

rested on consent. Our present problem would not 
have arisen if Imperial concentrations of authority 
had survived in Berlin, Petersburg and Vienna. It 
is the process of dissolution and Balkanization which 
have made a world-government necessary. It can- 
not be the League as we know it to-day. It cannot 
be forever the Alliance. 



CHAPTER III 

AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 

It was amid the experiences of the Napoleonic 
struggle that Malthus alarmed our grandfathers with 
his gloomy essay on population. Another universal 
war has presented us with the problem of popula- 
tion in a new form. It is not niggardly nature or 
prolific man that has made this problem, but the 
perverse contrivances of statecraft. Its simple ele- 
ments may be stated in a few sentences. Before the 
war her world-trade enabled Germany to export 
manufactured goods on a scale that allowed her to 
purchase foreign-grown food for about fifteen mil- 
lions of her population. Her world-trade has been 
destroyed by the peace. If it is in some measure 
revived, it cannot be on the basis of an exchange of 
goods. The meaning of an indemnity is, in concrete 
terms, that the nation which pays it must export 
goods for the consumption of the victors, without 
receiving their equivalent in imports. Some im- 
port, if only of raw materials, there must of course 
be, but it is only by the surplus of exports over im- 
ports that Germany can, year by year, pay the 

85 



86 AFTER THE PEACE 

tribute which the victors have imposed upon her. 
Every quarter of wheat which she receives from 
abroad diminishes the possible surplus available for 
the indemnity, and while her currency remains the 
nearly worthless medium that it is, her population 
must perform an inordinate amount of labor in 
order to buy this foreign food and to pay for its 
transport in foreign ships. Worse still is the case of 
Austria, where, as the result of depreciation of the 
Krone, even skilled artisans earn in our currency only 
2d. an hour. What this means in human values will 
be grasped at once. In order to earn a loaf of bread 
made with American flour, an English artisan need 
work only for half an hour. An Austrian artisan 
must, for the same real reward in foreign food, 
work for six hours. Even so the problem of pay- 
ment is not solved. Hitherto Germany has im- 
ported foreign food ^ partly by using up her scanty 
reserves of gold, partly by running into debt, and 
partly by exporting coal, to which, in strict law, 
the Allies had a prior claim. H ever she settles 
down in earnest to pay the indemnity in the 
measure which the Allies contemplate, it is hard to 
see how she can afford to spend anything on the 
purchase of foreign food. 

What then will become of the fifteen millions 

1 Referring to this importation of food by Germany, the 
" Economic Survey " of the Department of Overseas Trade 
describes it as necessary, and yet as *' a course which she can- 
n'ot afford to take." (p. 35). 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 87 

who lived in pre-war days by exchanging their man- 
ufactures for foreign food? Mr. Hoover gave one 
possible answer, when he said that twelve millions 
of the German race would have to emigrate. That 
is a soothing way of stating the facts. They can- 
not emigrate. The whole of the Allied world is 
closed to them, including the United States. Latin 
America and Russia are the only possible fields for 
emigration. The scarcity and dearness of shipping 
forbids, if there were no other reason, any mass 
emigration in a short space of time to South 
America, though on a small scale it has begun, and 
will probably increase. Russia would welcome 
emigrants from the skilled Socialistic town-workers, 
but that also can be only on a small scale, while her 
own food difficulties continue. H emigration pro- 
vides no early solution, there remain only two 
alternatives, the reduction of the population by 
death and the restriction of births, or else the lower- 
ing of the whole standard of life. Either the Ger- 
man race will diminish by some figure not far short 
of these twelve or fifteen millions, or else it will 
struggle to subsist on siege rations, sinking in the 
process to an elementary level of civilization. 
Where bread is short there can be little culti- 
vation of the things of the mind. That is at present 
a fair statement of the case of Central Europe, and 
there are Allied Statesmen who contemplate it in 
cold blood as a penmanent consequence of the war. 



88 AFTER THE PEACE 

Mr. Benes, the Foreign Minister of Czecho-Slovakia, 
said publicly the other day that Vienna is destined 
to lose half its present population. Populations do 
not expire by the million painlessly. The mental 
and physical agony which Vienna will go through 
before it has reached a level consistent with Czech 
ambitions, means a hell more prolonged and more 
horrible than the war itself. It is not the survival 
of the fittest which this hideous process promotes. 
Feudal and agrarian Roumania, against whose name 
there stands in the records of civilization not one 
entry of one solitary achievement in letters, science, 
or the arts, will thrive and multiply. It is the science 
and the music of Vienna, which gave us, this one 
city, from Haydn to Brahms, more than half the 
world's treasure of sound, that the settlement has 
doomed. 

COAU 

One might state this whole problem of popula- 
tion in terms of coal. It was the abundance of 
coal in Germany as in Great Britain which underlay 
their industrial prosperity, and enabled them to feed 
a population far in excess of their internal food 
resources. Coal means wealth and power, and the 
motif of coal runs through all the jangled music of 
the war and the settlement. The fixed purpose ef 
German capitalistic -militarism, was, while its hopes 
ran high, to annex the northern coal-fields of France, 
and to control the mines of Belgium. The plan 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 89 

was even worked out in a Memorial presented by 
German industrialists to the Chancellor, by which an 
indemnity, to be levied on France, would cover the 
cost of purchasing these mines. ^ When these hopes 
finally vanished, Ludendorff wrecked the French 
mines. The purpose of that destruction was not 
military; it was done in order to lame the industry 
of a rival. Those who did it must have been foolish 
enough to suppose that they thereby assured to their 
own coal-owners and exporters the profits of the 
European scarcity which would result. Capitalism, 
once more, aims not at plenty but at profit. That 
was the first act in the continental tragedy of coal, 
which is not yet completed. The scarcity of coal, 
due firstly to Ludendorff's vandal act, followed at 
once, but it is not German capitalism which has 
profited by it. It has brought a rich harvest of gain 
to our own coal-owners and shippers. While we 
expressed our just indignation at the destruction, 
and were prodigal in our verbal sympathy with 
France, we acted under the prompting of the usual 
capitalistic motives. We charged the French 115 
or even 130 shillings a ton for coal, nor was this 
merely the act of a greedy industry. Coal was con- 
trolled all the while, and the Government actually 
reduced the price to the home consumer last winter 
by ten shillings a ton, and made up the loss by 

1 There is no evidence that responsible German Statesmen 
adopted this plan* 



V 



90 AFTER THE PEACE 

profiteering at the expense of our Allies. To Italy, 
when freight was added, we even sold our coal at 
over £i2 a ton. In Vienna meantime, while the 
tramways stood still and the schools were closed for 
lack of coal, the people were cutting down the superb 
wood outside the city which had been its pride and 
delight, and staggering back, half starved as they 
were, under their loads of timber over long miles 
of streets. 

The Peace Treaties more than reproduce the worst 
of the German plans in regard to coal. Though 
the ambition of France to annex the Saar territory 
outright was successfully opposed by Mr. Wilson, 
she has obtained its valuable coal-mines as a per- 
petual possession, and she will occupy the territory 
for fifteen years. The fate of Upper Silesia is still 
in doubt. It has been assigned to Poland, with the 
whole of its coal deposits, but a plebiscite has still 
to ratify this decision. The majority of the popu- 
lation is certainly Polish by race, but the territory 
had never belonged to Poland ; the people had been 
to some extent assimilated, and the figures of recent 
elections never yielded a majority under manhood 
suffrage for the Polish nationalist candidates. Po- 
land has been allowed to annex in Posen and West 
Prussia big German minorities, which will give her 
over two million unwilling German subjects. There 
is something to be said for the argument that it 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 91 

would be only fair, by way of compensation, to 
leave Upper Silesia, with its indispensable coal and 
its Polish inhabitants, to Germany. Again, the deci- 
sion to draw the frontiers of Czecho-Slovakia, not 
on racial but on historical lines, is one of the main 
causes of the ruin of Vienna. A good deal of the 
coal of Bohemia and Moravia is found on the fringes 
of these provinces, which have a German population 
and are easily detachable. Many of these mines are 
owned by German-Austrian companies and worked 
by German-Austrian labor. They ought by rights 
to have fallen to German-Austria. The policy of 
the Czech State is to build up its own industrial pre- 
dominance at the expense especially of Vienna, and 
for that purpose it has ruthlessly restricted the ex- 
port of coal, and thereby lamed not merely those 
Austrian industries which depended on coal for 
power, but also the production of steel from the ores 
of which Austria has a fair supply. 

These annexations of coal basins at the expense 
of the German race would have been sufficiently 
serious if they had stood alone. The Treaty adds, 
however, provisions for the levying of a specific 
tribute in coal for the benefit of France, Belgium and 
Italy. In so far as this is intended to make good 
the destruction of the French mines by Ludendorff, 
it is just. The coal tribute goes, however, far be- 
yond that reasonable limit. That just reparation 



92 AFTER THE PEACE 

accounts for 20,000,000 tons annually, and this 
quantity will diminish, as the French mines are grad- 
ually restored. The loss to Germany, apart from 
this first charge, amounts (i) to 14,000,000 tons, 
the yearly pre-war yield of the Saar and Alsace- 
Lorraine mines; and (2) an average tribute of 25,- 
000,000 tons annually to be paid, in addition to the 
levy for reparation, to France, Italy and Belgium. 
(3) If the Upper Silesian mines are also taken, 
that will involve a further annual loss of 43,800,000 
tons. It is true that the Treaty secures to Germany 
the' right to buy this coal from Poland, but even if 
she actually gets the coal, the purchase will affect 
her trade balance. The net result, when allowance 
is made for the fact that Germany in her diminished 
area will require less coal than before the war, is 
reckoned by Mr. Maynard Keynes to be that Ger- 
many will need 1 10,000,000 tons annually, if she is 
to maintain her existing industries, but will in fact 
have at her disposal an average of only 60,000,000 
tons, and in the first years of the peace only 55,000,- 
000 tons. In -point of fact the production in Ger- 
many has fallen off even more seriously than he 
estimated, owing partly to the dilapidation of min- 
ing machinery and material during the war, partly 
to the decline in the physique of the miners, due to 
imder-nourishment, and partly to the political unrest 
which affects all German, and indeed most European 
workers. One need not spend many words in fore- 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 93 

casting what the condition of an industrial country 
must be when its coal supply is reduced to one half .^ 
The inference is clear that German industry cannot 
possibly recover anything like its old productivity. 
It will be barely able to supply the internal market 
with necessities, even if the level of comfort sinks to 
that of the more primitive populations of Eastern 
Europe. It can produce very little for export, and 
the coal itself, with its by-products, will be almost 
the sole contribution of Germany towards the in- 
demnity. 

THE INDEMNITY 

Of the indemnity itself, regarded as a sum meas- 
urably in thousands of millions sterling, it is super- 
fluous to say much, for the brilliant and lucid book 

1 The " Economic Survey " of our own Department of Over- 
seas Trade (p. 37) says : " Germany is suffering from a com- 
plete lack of raw materials in almost all industries. Produc- 
tion is further hampered by the shortage of coal as well as by 
the serious depreciation of machinery." The " Survey " goes 
on to give a list of important factories temporarily closed 
down and (p. 42) states that the foreign trade of Germany 
is "at present practically negligible." 

The latest obtainable official figures (February 1920) of the 
German food rations show that, even now, they are still only 
approximately half of the physiological minimum. About 
3,000 calories, of which 60 should be fats, are required daily 
by a healthy adult. The German civilian food cards supply 
only 1,545 calories, of which 25 are fats. 

The Spa Conference (July 1920) which opened an era of 
direct conversations with the Germans, led to a considerable 
whittling away of the extravagant demands of the Treaty. 



94 AFTER THE PEACE 

of Mr. Keynes has treated this whole subject with 
unrivaled authority. The whole basis of the as- 
sessment has been dishonest from the start. When 
Germany laid down her arms and accepted an armis- 
tice which deprived her of all further power of re- 
sistance, she by no means surrendered uncondition- 
ally. She surrendered on the basis of the Fourteen 
Points, subject, of course, to the reservations which 
the British Government placed on record. An hon- 
est reading of the Points and the letter of reserva- 
tion makes the German Government liable for the 
restoration of the ravaged districts, and also for 
losses suffered by civilians in such episodes of the 
war as the submarine campaign and the air-raids. 
But to add to this, as the sophistical AlHed lawyers 
have done, a liability to pay for the allowances and 
pensions disbursed to the civilian relatives of sol- 
diers, was to make a use of our power to dictate, 
which no fair-minded neutral Court would be likely 
to sustain. It is hard to say what the total of an 
indemnity based on the admitted liability for devas- 
tation and for damage done to civilians should 

The coal tribute was reduced to 24,000,000 tons per annum 
(exclusive, of course, of what is lost in the Saar and may be 
lost in Upper Silesia). The residue left to German industry- 
is still inadequate, however. The strain, moreover, on the 
Ruhr miners who have to hew out this tribute would be 
terrific even if they were adequately fed. They are working 
ten and a half hours on two days of the week, and over 
eight hours on the other days. 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 95 

amount to. Mr. Keynes suggests a total of 
2,cx)0,ooo,ooo sterling, less £500,000,000 paid al- 
ready in kind. This would mean, with out interest, 
an anual sum of £50,000,000 for thirty years. His 
estimate of what -Germany could afford to pay was 
based, however, on conditions which are unlikely to 
be fulfilled. He assumed her restoration to 
her rights as a trader in the world's market, the 
sparing of her big and profitable enterprises abroad, 
the reduction of the coal tribute, an arrangement 
which would give her access to the iron ore of Lor- 
raine, the creation of a Central European Customs 
Union, and the floating of a great international loan 
to stabilize Germany's currency and enable her to 
purchase raw material. How near the Allies will 
yet come, to these conditions, we do not yet know. 
Writing without that knowledge I find it hard to 
believe that, even after a further interval of two 
years, Germany will be able to pay any indemnity 
worth counting — apart, that is to say, from some 
coal tribute and the indemnity of over 500,000,000 
sterling, which she has paid already. 

The available data make it clear that any estimates 
of her future capacity to pay anything whatever 
are wildly speculative, and gamble on the chances 
of a brilliant and rapid recovery, of which there is 
no sign. The Budget of the German Reich for the 
present year shows a revenue on paper (by no means 
Hkely to be realized) of 28 milliards of paper marks. 



96 AFTER THE PEACE 

The taxation is mainly direct, and includes not 
merely a steeply-graded income tax and succession 
duty, but also a levy on war-wealth, and in addi- 
tion a general levy on capital. This taxation is 
hardly capable of much increase, and it accounts al- 
ready for much of the violent discontent of the 
middle and upper classes. What the total national 
income of Germany may be, one can only guess. 
Before the war, in 19 13, it was 43 milliard marks. 
The official figures for 19 18- 19, on which Hterr 
Erzberger based his daring Budget, gave 48 mil- 
liards, including both taxed and untaxed incomes, 
with a margin for concealment. The real income 
may not have risen in the interval, but the nominal 
income probably has risen, as the mark has fallen. 
On a rough guess it is possible that the present na- 
tional income of all Germany may be 60 milliards of 
paper marks.^ Of this half is taken in taxation 
(for the State and municipal taxes have to be added 
to those of the Reich), an enormous and unparal- 
leled proportion. With all this taxation the Bud- 
get does not balance. The deficit for the present 
year was estimated by the finance minister, Dr. 
Wirth, at 50 milliard paper marks. Germany, in 
plain words, is bankrupt. How, from a deficit like 
this, the AlHes can obtain their minimum yearly in- 
demnity of £150,000,000 in gold (equal to about 

1 The mark was about 200 to the £1 when this was written. 
It has since risen. 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 97 

30 milliards of paper marks) is a puzzle which might 
have engaged the promoters of Laputa. An indem- 
nity is paid in the last resort by a surplus of exports 
over imports: The German trade returns for the 
first half of 1920 are far from showing a favorable 
trade-balance. There was, on the contrary, a heavy 
deficit. 

Practical men have long ago dismissed the Ger- 
man indemnity as a vain imagining from their 
thoughts. If the Germans can pay nothing, they 
incline to say, then we shall gain nothing, but neither 
will they lose. That is much too simple a view. 
They have paid something — the tools, in the shape 
of ships and locomotives, with which they might 
have recovered their productivity. They will con- 
tinue to pay something — the coal which might have 
driven their idle mills. Worst of all, the attempt to 
extort an impossible and unjustifiable indemnity will 
have its disturbing effects, political, psychological 
and economic, upon the whole life of Germany and 
of Europe. It may break the springs of enterprise 
and work in Germany itself. Men are not bees, 
who will continue to labor when all the honey is 
taken from the hive. Above all, the attempts to 
extort this tribute by threats of coercion will make 
French militarism the shaping force in the politics 
of Europe. Step by step, first in our relation with 
Germany and eventually in our relation with Russia, 
we shall become the armed bailiffs of Europe, stand- 



98 AFTER THE PEACE 

ing with our weapons in our hands, to exact a debt, 
repugnant to conscience and common sense, from 
two hundred millions of civilized men. 

The indemnity is the form which this tribute takes 
in the case of Germany. Against Russia, France 
cherishes relentlessly her claim for the repayment 
and recognition of the gigantic public debt oi Tsarist 
Russia, which the revolution repudiated, and to that 
must be added the colossal indemnities due to for- 
eign companies which owned factories, iron-works, 
oil-wells and mining concessions. These claims are 
all doubtless good in the eyes of the law, but even 
at law the Russian Republic might build up a formid- 
able counter claim. Our breach of neutrality in 
the American Civil War, when by mere negligence 
we allowed the armed cruiser Alabama to sail from 
the Mersey in the service of the South, cost us, when 
the case went to arbitration, a fine to the victorious 
North of three and a quarter millions sterling. At 
what sum would a neutral Court assess the fines 
and damages due from us, and from most of the 
Allies, for our open and deliberate breaches of neu- 
trality, by blockade, bombardments, military expe- 
ditions, supplies of munitions and direct subsidies 
given to the defeated party in the Russian Civil 
War? Set on one page of the ledger the losses of 
investors and bond-holders, and on the other the 
agony and impoverishment, the disease and the 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 99 

Slaughter due to our blockade and our intervention, 
and we may doubt whether the reckoning would 
show a balance in favor of the Allies. By the pur- 
suit of one claim or another, Western capitalism is 
placing itself in a relation of creditor, rent-receiver, 
and tribute-taker towards the two impoverished Re- 
publics of Germany and Russia. These two hun- 
dred millions of men will be made to feel that they 
are the debt-slaves of the eighty-five millions of the 
two Western Allies. Eventually they may come 
together and eventually they may revolt. These 
claims for debts and indemnities are a terrific charge 
of political dynamite under the flimsy international 
structure of Europe. 

EXPLOITATION 

The annexation of valuable territory, the levying 
of a coal tribute, the destruction of German world- 
trade and the imposition of an indemnity, are not 
the only methods by which the victorious powers 
have sought their own economic advantage at the 
expense of the vanquished. Rather tardily, a more 
intimate process of direct exploitation is commend- 
ing itself to some financial groups in the Allied coun- 
tries. When a backward country beyond the con- 
fines of Europe is conquered, we know what to ex- 
pect. The capital of the victorious power will go 
there to " open up " the country. It will carry out 



lOO AFTER THE PEACE 

engineering works, develop the raw materials, and 
start industries, if the local labor is abundant and 
tractable, and in all these undertakings it will profit 
by the difference in the standard of life between 
Western and Eastern labor. A curiously similar 
process is now going on in Central Europe. These 
countries are ruined, and yet they still possess im- 
mense assets. The factories may stand idle, but 
they are well equipped. The workers may be unem- 
ployed and half -starved, but they retain their tech- 
nical skill, their manual deftness, their high level of 
education. There are severe limits to the gains to 
be won from exploiting coolie labor. The Asiatic 
factory hand may be content with a ridiculous wage, 
but, on the other hand, he can mind only one ma- 
chine (it even takes two Chinese weavers to mind 
one loom), where a Lancashire weaver can watch 
four, or even six. The fall of the Central Euro- 
pean exchanges made available a supply of labor 
hardly dearer than that of coolies, but in industry, 
education and skill as good as the best at home. 
In a privately circulated Memorandum sent out to 
English financiers in the hope of interesting them in 
a syndicate formed to do business in Austria, the 
statement was made that, measured in Kronen, the 
labor of a skilled metal-worker costs in Austria 700- 
800 Kronen a week, while the same degree of skill 
will fetch the equivalent of 5000 Kronen in Eng- 
land and 12,000 in the United States. As the De- 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS loi 

partment of Overseas Trade states in its official 
publication/ the wages of this high-grade labor are 
in Austria only 2d. an hour. Add to this the fact 
that going concerns can be bought with the exchange 
fantastically in our favor, for the Krone stands now 
at 1,500, instead of the normal 25 to the pound. 
The meaner sort of speculators settled like ghouls on 
the prostrate bodies of Germany and Austria im- 
mediately after the armistice, and bought up jew- 
ellery, furs, art treasures, and such remnants 
of exportable stocks as they could find, on the 
basis of this exchange. They were followed by 
more serious financiers, at first chiefly French 
and 'Italian, who acquired the hotels and the 
bigger restaurants, and began to "penetrate" the 
banks. The one big steel works in Austria went 
to an Italian syndicate ; France is said to be in treaty 
to acquire the Hungarian State Railways. A Brit- 
ish trust is acquiring the steamship trade of the Dan- 
ube. Several American firms have made their ap- 
pearance in Vienna with an eye apparently on the 
textile factories of Austria. This foreign capital 
claims the same favored position in the eye of the 
law to which it is accustomed in Turkey and other 
Oriental countries. It will be exempted from the 
Austrian capital levy, and some American firms are 
said to have asked (I do not know with what suc- 

^ " Economic Survey of Certain Countries Specially Affected 
by the War," p. 52. 



102 AFTER THE PEACE 

cess) for exemption from the law which sets up an 
elected Works Council in every factory. In Ger- 
many the process goes more slowly and encounters 
some patriotic resistance, but none the less one usu- 
ally finds in any German newspaper opened at ran- 
doitn some item of news which reports the penetra- 
tion of American, Dutch or British capital in some 
textile, or electrical or banking concern. As yet 
the more usual form of this foreign participation is 
on the commission basis. The foreign financier sup- 
plies raw materials to the German or Austrian fac- 
tory, and receives them back as finished products, 
less a percentage which covers the labor costs and 
the manufacturers' profit. As the labor and the 
manufacturers' charges are paid in marks and 
Kronen, while the product is sold for pounds or dol- 
lars, it will be obvious that these commission trans- 
actions may be very profitable. 

It would be a mistake to speak harshly of these 
ventures. They are welcomed by Viennese opin- 
ion. They are bringing work to a desperate and un- 
employed population, and that is an inestimable gain, 
even though the foreign capitalist is hiring labor at 
a price below the world level of bare subsistence. 
But for these easily-criticized transactions the tragic 
children of Vienna would be even nearer to naked- 
ness and starvation than they are to-day. It is 
probable, also, that some of the financiers who are 
leading these enterprises are acting under a genu- 



AN ECHO OF MALTHUS 103 

inely philanthropic motive. None the less, the whole 
process, which no single brain has consciously 
planned, reveals the subconscious working of a cap- 
italist statecraft in its fatal logic of exploitation. 
First, by the unduly protracted blockade, and then 
by the merciless peace, these countries are ruined 
and dismembered. The exchange reflects the hope- 
lessness of their future. Comes a moment when 
influential voices are raised to implore American 
support for an international loan to enable them 
to restore their currency and purchase raw materials 
on their own account. The answer comes back that 
their restoration must be left to " private initiative.'* 
It steps in, buys up what Allied policy has cheap- 
ened, and thrives upon the ruin. The Good Samar- 
itan is at work. He pours in oil and wine at a profit. 
One might suspect him of collusion with the other 
persons in the parable. 

It is hard to say how far this " penetration "of 
Central Europe is destined to go. The dislocation 
of transport, the wild and sudden variations of the 
exchange, and the risk of revolution seem to hold 
it in check at present. There are observers in 
Vienna and Berlin who believe that all Central Eu- 
rope will become economically an Allied ** colony," 
in the sense that India is " run " by British capital. 
At least the beginnings are apparent, which might 
lead in the Danubian States, at any rate, to that 
result. If that should happen, two curiously con- 



104 AFTER THE PEACE 

trary consequences may follow. In the first place, 
this capitalist influence, gradually acquiring a big 
stake in Central Europe, may begin to counteract 
the cruder and more oppressive influences at home, 
and to plead for a milder treatment of the van- 
quished. Secondly, as the native capitalist class 
finds itself elbowed out by foreigners, it may, from 
its own national standpoint, incline to make com- 
mon cause with the working class in a social revolt 
against capitalist exploitation, all the more odious 
because it is foreign. These are remote specula- 
tions. The fact is that victorious capital is begin- 
ning in some degree to apply its familiar colonial 
technique. A foreign element has been thrust into 
the economic life of Central Europe, and the reac- 
tions, political and social, may be unpredictably com- 
plex. 



CHAPTER IV 

HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 

Defeat and a dictated peace impose passivity on 
the vanquished population. To attempt any action 
to better its own lot is at once impossible and inex- 
pedient. The shock of defeat paralyzes for a time ; 
the means of action, whether military or economic, 
are lacking, and prudence suggests that any move- 
ment may excite the suspicion of the conquerors. 
This phase of passivity, however, will give way to 
action as the months and years go by. No white 
people will acquiesce in a sentence of helotry, and 
if it feels that the political and economic conditions 
imposed upon it are fatal to its progress, to the 
maintenance of its former level of civilization, or 
even to its survival, it will attempt, or sections of it 
will attempt, to grapple with its fate. The more 
intolerable these conditions are, the more reckless 
will be its movement of protest. It may be diffi- 
cult to imagine a renewal of war on the scale and in 
the style of the struggle which ended in 1918, but 
revolution is possible, and in the condition of semi- 
disarmament and political fluidity which is that of all 
Central Europe, even small forces of armed men 

105 



io6 AFTER THE PEACE 

imperfectly equipped for regular warfare may pro- 
duce a disturbing effect. If it is true that the van- 
quished are in no position to place in the field mil- 
lions of conscripts, it is also true that the victors are 
in no condition to mobilize again. What a semi- 
regular army of Turks does to-day in Asia to defy 
the Peace Treaty, might be attempted, first, perhaps, 
by the Hungarians, in Europe to-morrow. Men 
will not lie down passively to die, and the lack of 
bread is a spur which will always prompt virile 
races to desperate action. As the original stocks 
which peopled our Continent in the dark ages by 
their wanderings in search of corn-lands and pasture 
battled under the stress of need, so men may break 
out from this over-populated pen fold of Central 
Europe in search of the modern necessities, coal and 
iron ore. The wars of the immediate future will 
be hunger-wars. What else was the struggle be- 
tween starving Poland and starving Russia for the 
rich corn-lands of the Ukraine? 

There are, speaking broadly, three paths among 
which the defeated peoples may choose a road from 
their present miseries : First, social revolution, im- 
plying an alliance with Russia; then social reaction, 
with its implications of militarism and an eventual 
war of revanche; and thirdly, as a middle course, 
liberal or semi-Socialist democracy with a program 
of peaceful reconstruction and hard work. Though 
it is the tendencies towards one of these extremes 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 107 

which have attracted most attention, one should not 
forget that in Germany, in Austria, and even for a 
few months in Hungary, it was the middle road 
which the majority trod. The prevalent current of 
thought was liberal. Each of these three States be- 
came a .Republic, and both Germany and Austria 
adopted an elaborately perfect democratic constitu- 
tion, with all the latest improvements in the shape 
of women's suffrage and proportional representa- 
tion. The ideology of the League of Nations was 
fashionable. The governing Coalition sought a 
solution of social problems by various Socialistic 
compromises. Elected Works Councils were set up 
on a statutory plan. The eight-hour day was en- 
forced. Plans were considered and promises given 
to socialize coal-mines. The adoption of republican 
democracy had been all but dictated to Germany by 
President Wilson in the exchange of telegrams which 
led up to the armistice. It was understood, and in- 
deed in some speeches both Mr. Wilson and Mr. 
Lloyd George had plainly said, that a " democratic " 
Germany might hope for better terms than a defiant 
" autocracy." These promises were shamelessly 
broken. It would have been impossible to treat the 
Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs more harshly than 
the three democratic republics were treated which 
had hurled them from their thrones. The result was 
that the middle course fell into discredit. Men 
ceased to believe that democracy, peace, gradual 



io8 AFTER THE PEACE 

social reconstruction, high taxation and hard work 
would lead to a tolerable existence. Hungary was 
the first to throw over the democratic parliamentary 
regime adopted under Count Karolyi. She has 
passed, through a brief period of communism, into 
a violent " white " reaction, monarchist, clerical, 
anti-Semitic and militarist. Central Europe learned, 
moreover, even before the peace was signed, that 
the Allies are not all of Mr. Wilson's way of think- 
ing in preferring to deal with democratic Republics. 
" White " Hungary under Admiral Horthy had bet- 
ter treatment from the Allies in general and from 
Britain in particular, than Republican Hungary had 
enjoyed under Count Karolyi, though no one could 
doubt the sincerity of his pacifism, his advanced 
liberalism, and his opposition to Prussianism during 
the war. It is, moreover, the general belief that 
French diplomacy favors the restoration of mon- 
archy in Central Europe either under a Hapsburg 
in Vienna or under a Wittelsbach in Munich. The 
second general election in Germany measured the 
change which a year's experience of peace with semi- 
starvation had brought about. The moderate Coal- 
ition, which had Liberalism and the golden mean 
for its program, lost its majority. The revolution- 
ary Socialist ** Left " quadrupled its representation. 
The two reactionary parties of the " Right," which 
had polled together only 15 per cent, in the former 
election, doubled their numbers in the Reichstag. 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 109 

This vote meant that, alike for the middle class and 
for the working class, life was rapidly becoming un- 
endurable, and each sought the way of escape in 
violent change. The moderates, from the Majority 
Socialists to the Catholic Center, are still just short 
of being half the population, but they have lost con- 
fidence, faith and prestige. It is from timidity, or 
habit, and no longer from hopeful conviction, that 
they adhere to the golden mean. 

THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 

Is social revolution then still a probable, or even 
a possible outcome of this desperate condition in 
Central Europe? Before the war very few of us 
believed in its possibility. Events in Russia, in 
Hungary and in Munich have shattered that skepti- 
cism. It is a possibility under certain conditions, 
and the business of an analytic student of contem- 
porary tendencies is to discover whether all these 
actual conditions were essential, and whether they 
may recur. 

The study is inordinately complex, for psycho- 
logical considerations cross the economic factors in 
the most baffling way, and one has to consider not 
merely the strength of the positive forces which 
make for revolution, but also that of the negative 
forces which resist it. The economic misery in 
Poland, for example, was much worse throughout 
19 19 than that of Hungary. In both countries the 



no AFTER THE PEACE 

larger part of the population was under the influence 
of Catholic and conservative habits of thought. In 
Poland, a revolution seemed unthinkable, because, in 
spite of poverty, bankruptcy, hunger, unemployment 
and typhus, the general mood was one of elation 
and hope. The Polish nation had risen from the 
grave: it reckoned itself one of the world's victors: 
it believed that a brilliant future of glory, expansion 
and power lay before it. It contrasted the gloomy 
past with the dazzling era to come, and felt able to 
endure the uncomfortable present. In Hungary, on 
the contrary, as in all the defeated countries, a glori- 
ous and satisfying past had been suddenly shattered. 
Gone were all megalomanias of Empire and patri- 
otism, the illusions of national grandeur which had 
helped to sustain the old fabric of a half -capitalist, 
half -feudal system. There is much truth in the 
epigram attributed to Marshal Foch, that "Bolshe- 
vism is a disease of the vanquished," but plainly it 
has lost a little of its truth with each week that has 
followed the victory. Disillusion has come promptly 
to Italy, and it may follow elsewhere. 

The second of the conditions which made revolu- 
tion possible was the disappearance or the disaffec- 
tion of the army. The demoralization of the Rus- 
sian army had begun long before the first revolution, 
and men were deserting in hundreds of thousands 
while the Tsar still reigned. By the time the Bolshe- 
viks made their coup d'etat, the army had become 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? in 

useless whether for offense or defense or for police. 
In Hungary as in Germany the demobilization had 
been so rapid that it resembled a dispersal after de- 
feat. There remained no organized force during 
the winter of 1918-1919 on which a moderate Gov- 
ernment could count to resist revolution. This was, 
as we shall see, in both countries, a temporary con- 
dition, but it was indispensable to the success of a 
violent revolution. The belief current before this 
war, that the superior armament of modern armies 
had made revolution obsolete, was true in the main. 
But defeat, when the soldiers believe that the disas- 
ter is the fault of their own ruling class, may turn 
conscript armies into an instrument of revolution. 
The positive aid of part of the army in the capital 
was a factor in the overthrow of the Kaiser and the 
Tsar. The fact that no trustworthy troops could 
be collected in time to resist the dictatorship of the 
proletariat was essential to the success of Lenin and 
of Bela Kun. Neither of them, in the early days 
when they made their stroke, could have collected 
" red guards " enough to deal with even one division 
of disciplined, reliable, regular troops under resolute 
commanders. 

The moving cause of revolution, which attained Its 
iresult, amid the collapse of the " bourgeois " ideol- 
ogy, and in the absence of armed resistance, was, 
of course, the economic misery of the proletariat. 
The revolution was the direct outcome of the bread 



112 AFTER THE PEACE 

queue. One must note, moreover, that in both Rus- 
sia and Hungary this economic misery had com.e to 
the most active part of the proletariat somewhat sud- 
denly. The war, with all its dangers and hardships, 
had none the less accustomed the young men of the 
laboring and poorer artisan and peasant classes to a 
standard of living decidedly better than their own. 
They ate meat daily and were not only well fed but 
well clad. They quitted the army to share the suf- 
ferings of the civil population under the blockade. 
With the sudden closing of the munition factories 
half Budapest (one may say even half Central Eu- 
rope) was unemployed, and it lived on doles, which 
lost a little of their purchasing power each day, as 
the blockade was tightened after the armistice. 
The miseries of the housing problem counted for 
more than any other single factor in Budapest, and 
they everywhere played their part. The housing 
conditions in Budapest were always execrable, and 
owing to the influx first of munition workers dur- 
ing the war, and then of Magyar and Jewish ref- 
ugees from the ceded territories after the armistice, 
the normal population of the city was doubled. 
People were sleeping in the slums twenty and even 
thirty to a room. 

The war had in many other ways fostered revo- 
lution. Conscription tended everywhere, even in 
England, to break up small businesses and to close 
little shops, whose proprietors were drawn into the 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 113 

army. On the Continent much less care was taken 
to spare these small interests. These middle-class 
men found themselves on demobilization without 
businesses, without prospects and often without 
homes. The parallel fact was an acceleration of the 
normal tendency to the accumulation of capital in 
big businesses, and the spectacle of the insolent 
wealth of these war-profiteers worked in a provoca- 
tive way upon the minds of men already disturbed 
by the loss of their old standards of comfort. 
Again, the intellectual workers, from the doctors to 
the clerks, had suffered relatively much more than 
the manual workers from the depreciation of the 
currency. They could no longer clothe, feed or edu- 
cate their children as the standards of their class 
required. Many of them were in pitiable want, and 
all of them felt themselves sinking to a proletarian 
level. They went over in shoals to the Socialists, 
and in Berlin the bank-clerks even conducted a strike 
for the right to join the Workmen's Council. Men 
who feel that their savings have become worthless, 
that the money in their pockets has lost its purchas- 
ing power, men who own only the one suit of clothes 
on their backs, and see their children going about 
in patched and threadbare dresses, are not likely 
to bring out their rifles for the defense of the old 
order of society. The working of these economic 
and psychological causes of revolution was enhanced 
by the mental condition of the peoples whose ner- 



114 AFTER THE PEACE 

vous system had been starved by years of underfeed- 
ing. Thinking was feverish and active. Disaster 
had made a vacuum in men's minds, and in their 
overwrought condition only a violent stimulus, a 
call to action on a grandiose scale, a promise of a 
new world, could have moved them. The hope of 
communism came to a neurotic society, bankrupt in 
everything but this last speculative hope. 

Some of these conditions which explain the revo- 
lution in defeated Russia, Hungary and Bavaria are 
still general throughout Central Europe. There is 
no improvement in the economic conditions. There 
is no alternative hope, unless it be a militarist reac- 
tion. None the less, there have been changes of a 
very far-reaching kind, which may make further 
successful revolutions improbable. In the first 
place, when one lays stress upon economic misery, 
and in particular upon the lowering of high stand- 
ards of living, as a cause of revolution, one implies 
that a social revolution promises a comparatively 
rapid improvement, at all events for the industrial 
proletariat. A people may make a revolution in 
sheer despair, even if it has no certainty of an early 
improvement in its lot, provided that it acts promptly 
in the first hour of its crisis. Delay brings reflec- 
tion, and the experience gained in the interval may 
have brought the knowledge that the dictatorship of 
the proletariat cannot promise any early improve- 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 115 

ment in its material conditions. Whether a Com- 
munist State, if it were brilliantly organized and 
could command internal supplies of food and raw 
materials, could raise the productivity of industry 
up to, or above the capitalist level, remains a specu- 
lative question. No clean scientific test of this all- 
important question has been allowed. A great part, 
perhaps the major part, of the disorganization and 
suffering which Russia and Hungary have under- 
gone, must be attributed to war, civil war and the 
blockade. Friends may assert, opponents may deny 
that Lenin and Bela Kun could have raised the level 
of comfort of the town workers, if the Soviets had 
enjoyed peace, and had been permitted to trade 
abroad. Neither opinion can be demonstrated con- 
clusively. The fact remains, however, even if one 
puts the chief blame on civil war and the blockade, 
that such accidents are to be expected when one 
makes a revolution. Socialists in Germany ex- 
pected that if they followed the Russian example, 
the British blockade would be applied to them also. 
Vienna, though it had better reasons for desperate 
action than any other city, knew very well that 
revolution would involve the total stoppage of its 
imported food supply. Agitators may promise that 
revolution means sudden betterment, but serious 
thinkers who believe in the Dictatorship postpone 
their hopes to a rather more distant date. One can 



ii6 AFTER THE PEACE 

get little more than luxury goods by expropriating 
the possessions of the rich. Even their dwellings 
cannot be converted easily and rapidly into homes 
for the working-class, if building materials and fur- 
niture are short. The old revolutionary school 
hoped for revolution in a crisis of over-production 
and unemployment. Then there would have been 
surplus goods to distribute, and the machinery of 
production would have been intact. If one makes a 
revolution after war, there is no surplus of goods 
nor is industry intact, and yet it is only after war, 
and then only after defeat, that a revolution seems 
to be feasible as a military undertaking. If a revo- 
lution follows a prolonged social conflict, marked 
by constant strikes, sabotage and the tactics of " ca' 
canny," the workers will have lost their productive 
discipline, and both in .Russia and in Hungary it 
has been found difficult to restore it. Shock tactics 
may upset the power of a capitalist class, but they 
do not uproot the capitalist mentality, the inculcated 
habits which respond to gain as the only adequate 
stimulus to effort. The Socialist State, when it 
seems to have won its battle by a sudden revolution, 
is really only at the beginning of its struggle with 
the surviving mind of the capitalist order. Even 
under the most favorable conditions, if it escaped 
war, civil war and the blockade, some years might 
pass before it could hope to organize production so 
successfully as to raise the town- workers' standard 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 117 

of life. In an able and objective book/ written 
after his experiences as Chief Commissioner for Pro- 
duction in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Dr. Eu- 
gen Varga (a former University Professor) de- 
clares very frankly that the summons to revolution 
is, even for the industrial workers, a call to self- 
sacrifice. One is reminded of a religious summons 
to a difficult life of abnegation. 



TOWN AND COUNTRY 

One may invent many reasons to explain after 
the fact, what none of us would have predicted, the 
success of the Social Revolution in Russia, and as 
yet in Russia alone. Nowhere in Europe does the 
industrial proletariat form so small a percentage of 
the population, yet this industrial proletariat alone 
made, and in spite of dwindling numbers, still sus- 
tains the revolution. Some partial explanations are 
possible; one may dwell on the numerical weakness 
of the Russian middle class, and its political imma- 
turity. One may point out that Russia had escaped 
those formative centuries from the Reformation 
downwards, which in Western Europe have made 
of the "bourgeois" Liberal tradition an ingrained 
mode of thought, from which even Socialist work- 

1 Die wirtschaftspolitischen Prohleme der proletarischen 
Viktatur. Wien, 1920. 



ii8 AFTER THE PEACE 

men can hardly free themselves. Again, given the 
evident incapacity, as leaders in a time of stress, of 
the moderates of Kerensky's school, there seems to 
be in .Russia only two real alternatives — Bolshevism 
or Tsardom. Any " white " counter-revolution led 
by the soldiers, officials and landowners of the old 
regime, will infallibly attempt to restore the old land- 
owning system, or will at least be suspected of in- 
tending to restore it. But perhaps the chief reason 
why revolution was possible in Russia, in Hungary, 
and even for a moment in Bavaria, is that these 
countries alone among all defeated nations in Cen- 
tral Europe are capable of feeding themselves. 
When once the revolution was achieved, however, 
experience showed the inordinate difficulty of deal- 
ing with a backward peasantry, and until Russia 
has overcome that difficulty, one cannot say with 
certainty that the revolution is stable, even there. 

The war and the blockade began a transforma- 
tion in the relation of town and country all over 
Central and Eastern Europe, which has deeply af- 
fected its political history already, and may be the 
determining factor in its future. If we had been 
asked, before the war, to define the normal economic 
relation of country and town, most of us would have 
answered that it is an ordinary relation of exchange. 
The country produces food and sells it to the town 
in exchange for manufactured goods. It was in 
reality much more complex than this simple state- 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 119 

ment suggests. The country really existed in a 
tributary relation to the town. Farmers and peas- 
ants paid rent, interest on mortgages and national 
taxes, and however the payment was disguised, the 
concrete fact is that they paid these obligations ulti- 
mately in kind. Rent, interest and taxes really went, 
through one channel or another, in the form of grain, 
meat and vegetables to the town. The relationship 
closely resembled that between an industrial country 
(say England) and an agrarian country (say Argen- 
tina). Argentina pays to England in grain and meat 
not merely the equivalent for the manufactured 
goods which we send out in any one season, but also 
a rent for the capital which our finance has sunk 
there. So in the case of town and country. An 
analysis of the values exchanged between a city and 
its rural districts would show, if statistical measure- 
ment were possible, that the city received much more 
than It gave out. It received, firstly, the food equiv- 
alent in barter of the clothing, furniture and tools 
which the farmers and peasants actually consumed, 
and, secondly, the food which covered rent, interest 
on loans, taxes, lawyers' fees, higher education, and 
many similar services performed by the town and 
the Central State machinery. 

The war and the blockade began to alter this bal- 
ance. Food became scarce and dear, and even the 
sharp control and the fixing of maximum prices 
could not prevent the farmers and peasants from 



120 AFTER THE PEACE 

"profiteering/' They grew rich out of scarcity, 
and accumulated money. At the same time rents, 
taxation, interests on mortgages and even the cost 
of the town's professional services remained nom- 
inally at or near the old figure. There was in Cen- 
tral Europe no attempt to pay for the war by taxa- 
tion, and of course pre-war loans and rents remained 
at the old level. In reality, as the currency depre- 
ciated, they fell to a merely nominal figure. Every- 
where farmers and peasants began to pay off mort- 
gages, or to buy their land. The result was that 
the regular tribute paid by the country to the town 
nearly disappeared. In part it was wiped out. In 
part it was still exacted, but in marks or Kronen, 
or roubles, which had sunk to a fraction of their 
former value. The Russian peasant might still pay 
the old tax measured in roubles, but he no longer 
paid the same measure of wheat or rye, or even an 
appreciable percentage of it. That is a universal 
phenomenon in Europe, and, as a consequence, half- 
starved towns everywhere confront an opulent 
countryside. The country no longer pays the old 
tribute to the town, and the town goes short by the 
amount of this surplus which it had formerly 
exacted. 

Nor could any voluntary exchange of goods re- 
place this old involuntary rent. The town produced 
much less than before. Paper money would buy 
little or nothing, and the peasants became increas- 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 121 

ingly reluctant to accept it. In Germany, Austria 
and Hungary the town lived in the last years of 
the war and the first year of peace largely by the 
illicit " knapsack trade." Townsmen went out into 
the country and carried back meat and meal or 
vegetables, which they obtained largely by bartering 
their own accumulated superfluities for these neces- 
sities. A glance at the advertisement columns of 
an Austrian newspaper will still show evidence that 
the town is exporting its jewels, furs, laces, linen, 
even its superfluous boots and underclothes, to pay 
for food obtained directly from the peasants or the 
smugglers who deal with them. Under cover of 
the enemy's blockade, the country which had been 
but lately the tributary of the town, now held its 
hunger to ransom. Its reluctance to part with food 
to the town became so extreme, that some even speak 
of the "blockade" of the town by the country. 

The country or, to be accurate, the producing 
peasantry, had in Russia and even in Hungary been 
oppressed by the town, or by the State which repre- 
sented the town. The Russian peasant before the 
war was underfed. The grain which he ought to 
have eaten was taken from him in taxes, and sent 
overseas to pay the interest on the foreign debt of 
Tsardom. The first use which the peasants made 
of their liberation from the former tribute was to 
increase their own consumption of their own 
produce. Many observers noted this fact in 



122 AFTER THE PEACE 

Russia even before the revolution. A Hunga- 
rian peasant was heard to say : " Once I used 
to eat my potatoes and send my ducks to market: 
now I eat the ducks and sell the potatoes." A peas- 
antry which had been left illiterate and uncultivated, 
felt no new need of the things with which the starv- 
ing town might still have supplied it. It ate its own 
surplus. The eastern peasant is to an extent, which 
would startle us with our experience of our own 
half-urban villages, independent of the town's prod- 
uce. He can at need make his own dip-candles, 
weave his own clothes, or revert to the use of the 
flail when he threshes.^ The reduction of the coun- 
try's tribute to the town meant very largely that the 
country had ceased to produce for the town, and 
met only its own needs. 

No country in Central or Eastern Europe, how- 
ever conservative, escapes this new relationship of 
the country to the town. Revolution immensely ag- 
gravated its inconvenience. The rent, which the 
country still paid, though only in nominal values, 
now disappeared altogether. In Hungary (I pre- 
fer to speak of the case which I saw personally) 
the Soviets abolished at one blow rents, interest on 
mortgages and land tax. The sounder policy would 
obviously have been to impose a heavy tax on all 
occupiers of agricultural land, payable in kind. 
Thanks to these measures, the town could now live 

1 See Varga, op. cit., p. 98. 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 123 

only by exchanging its manufactured goods, and of 
these it produced not more but less than before. 
The Soviet Republics also suffered from the con- 
scious hostility of the richer peasants, who now boy- 
cotted and blockaded the towns, not merely for eco- 
nomic reasons, but also in some degree from a dis- 
like of their " red " tendencies. The same phenom- 
enon is strongely marked in Austria, where the cler- 
ical and conservative peasants regard Socialistic 
Vienna, mild though its Socialism is, as a Babylon 
of iniquity, and there are even signs of it in the 
feeling of the rural districts towards Berlin. It 
may be an exaggeration to suppose that the country 
deliberately injures itself a little in order to hurt 
the goodless town more, but it is certainly true that 
the peasants, farmers and landlords (where these 
survive) refuse to regard it as any part of their 
patriotic duty to make the least effort, or to incur 
the smallest sacrifke to save the starving towns. 
Their reasons are mainly economic : the towns have 
nothing to sell; paper money is not worth gaining; 
no pressure of rent or taxation compels them to sell. 
But there may be a touch of sectarian and partisan 
malice in the indifference with which the Austrian 
peasant watches the agony of Vienna. 

Another phase in the new relationship of town 
and country will begin whenever, if ever, the new 
democratic States begin to break up the big feudal 
estates of Central and Eastern Europe. This has 



124 AFTER THE PEACE 

happened already, in the Baltic States broken 
off from Russia. It is happening to a certain 
extent in Roumania. It is happening also in 
Czecho-Slovakia, at any rate in all cases where the 
big landowners are Germans or Magyars. It may 
happen in Poland, though as yet the Diet has merely 
passed a rather weak resolution by a majority of one 
vote,, in favor of the gradual expropriation of the 
larger estates., in return for full compensation. In 
Prussia, also, a warning has been given that com- 
pulsory expropriation will begin a year hence, unless 
the Junkers in the meanwhile sell voluntarily. One 
may doubt whether much will happen to give effect 
to these threats either in Prussia or in Poland, short 
of a Social revolution. In Hungary also, the peas- 
ants, though at present they may back the ** white ** 
counter-revolution, are resolute in demanding the 
breaking-up of the big estates. Socialism may 
preach in theory the advisability of the extensive 
cultivation of big estates on a communal plan, and 
may attempt, as it does in Russia and did in Hun- 
gary, to realize this system. In practice, however, 
it seems fated to further the break-up of the big 
estates in favor of what is virtually peasant owner- 
ship. The effect is bound to be detrimental to the 
towns. In the first place, even where the peasant 
pays purchase-instalments, he will pay less than his 
old rent, and thus the tribute to the town is dimin- 
ished. In the second place, a narrow-minded, ill- 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 125 

educated peasantry, often too ignorant to see the 
advantages even of cooperative methods, produces 
on these small estates very much less than the same 
land yielded under the more or less scientific 
cultivation of the big landlord. The outlook 
for the towns seems to be distinctly v^orse under 
peasant agriculture than under the feudal system. 
Politically, moreover, a peasantry which may in some 
countries, for a time, and for certain purposes, 
make a sort of fighting alliance with moderate So- 
cialism, until it obtains the coveted land, will become 
solidly conservative in its voting, so soon as it has 
got the land. The town loses not merely its ^old 
ascendancy as the tribute-taker: it also loses its 
leadership in politics and polls only its own vote. 

The broad fact would seem to be then, that the 
economic consequences of the war and the blockade 
include a reversal in the relations of tow^n and coun- 
try which were usual in modern European States. 
The country realizes its independence, and is eco- 
nomically in a position to dictate to the town. It 
is an audacious experiment in such conditions to plan 
a dictatorship of the urban proletariat. One may 
proclaim it, one may even partially realize it, but 
Russian experience suggests so far, that even with 
great address, with all the resources of skillful propa- 
ganda and armed force at its command, the prole- 
tarian State may be for years at grips with the ef- 
fective economic dictatorship, unorganized and un- 



126 AFTER THE PEACE 

intelligent though it is, of the food-producing coun- 
tryside. One thinks of the primitive Roman polit- 
ical parable of the members and the belly. The Rus- 
sian Socialist State may eventually win in this strug- 
gle, but the object lesson of its difficulties is a severe 
deterrent to Socialists in Central Europe. The case, 
however, is sufficiently serious in either event. The 
German Socialist movement may shrink from at- 
tempting a social revolution, because it knows that 
if it did so, it would be starved by the joint blockade 
of the Allies and its own peasantry. But it also 
knows that if it makes no revolution, it will be 
slowly starved out by the loss of its foreign trade 
and the operation of the indemnity. If it could in- 
augurate a constructive agricultural policy, it might 
in a few years save itself without revolution. With 
a sufficiency of coal and raw materials, it could 
again produce goods to exchange for home-grown 
food. If it were strong enough to tax the wealthy 
countryside heavily, as it ought to be taxed, it 
would stimulate production.^ If it had moral pres- 

1 Such phrases are easily written, but the mere restoration 
of agriculture in Central Europe to its pre-war level of pro- 
ductivity will be difficult. What is needed to cover the loss 
of imported food would be in Germany an increase of pro- 
ductivity by 15 per cent. That must be achieved, moreover, 
in spite of the loss of Posen, one of the most productive 
provinces. At present, or rather in 1919, the decrease in the 
productivity of the soil amounted, according to Professor 
Starling's official report, to 40 per cent. (" Report on Food 
Conditions in Germany," Cmd. 280), while the live stock, tak- 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 127 

tige, it might educate the peasantry into the adop- 
tion of a more social attitude, and organize them for 
increased scientific production, so as to reduce the 
need for imports to a minimum. It is as yet too 
weak, too battered, too dejected, too divided, to do 
any of these things. The consequence may be a 
decay of the whole urban civilization which Europe 
had based on the industrial system. 

THE MILITARIST REACTION 

If revolutionary Socialism in Central Europe 
seeks a way of escape from the intolerable present 
by creating a new world, the militarist reaction 
would restore the glorious past on its traditional 
foundations. It must fight on two fronts. It is 
opposed, first and chiefly, to the parties of the Left, 
which destroyed the old Hohenzollern and Hapsburg 
Monarchies in the republican revolution, and it 
thrives largely by trading on the danger that this 
democratic revolution may be followed, on the Rus- 
sian precedent, by a plunge into Communism, It 
is against responsible Parliamentary Government: 
and it would restore the Monarchy. Its driving mo- 
tives are a dread, firstly, of the drastic direct taxa- 
tion of wealth to which the Republic has resorted; 
and, secondly, of the growing power of organized 

ing quality with quantity, had decreased by 55 per cent. The 
chief necessity seems to be artificial fertilizers, especially 
phosphates, which we have monopolized. 



ii28 AFTER THE PEACE 

labor, which has achieved through the statutory 
Works Councils a share in the control of industry. 
Its two sections represent in Germany the "heavy 
industries" and capital generally (German People's 
Party) and the Junker agrarian interest (German 
National People's Party). In Austria the similar 
forces are on the surface primarily clerical and Cath- 
olic. In Hungary their speciality is a savage anti- 
Semitism, known locally as " Christianity.'* " None 
of these parties disdain constitutional methods. The 
Germans under Herr Stinnes (the coal magnate) 
buy up newspapers wholesale, and have done well 
at the polls. But, ultimately, all these parties rely 
on armed force, and aim at a military coup d'etat, as 
inevitably as the Communists work for a violent 
revolution. They have with them the whole of the 
old professional officer caste, which, besides sharing 
their politics and the royalist tradition, has also lost 
a career through the disarmament prescribed in the 
Peace Treaties. The Army has for the reaction a 
double importance. It is firstly and chiefly the in- 
surance against a proletarian revolution. It is also 
the tool which must somehow be kept sharp and 
serviceable against the day when force may be used 
with some prospect of success to reverse the ruin and 
humiliation of the Peace Treaties. A wistful and 
romantic regret for the glorious past blends with 
the much harder and shrewder elements of nation- 
alistic capitalism. 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 129 

It was the Spartacists, whose desperate, ill-calcu- 
lated attempts at revolution in the winter of 19 18- 
19 1 9 compelled the German Republic to improvise 
an armed force. The " Free Corps," which Herr 
Nbske raised under old professional officers, were 
composed of the minority which enjoys war as a 
trade. These young men were attracted chiefly by 
the lure of good food and good clothes, but they 
soon became under instruction, during their bitter 
feud with the working class, a reliable class army. 
Republicans were systematically weeded out when 
their numbers were reduced. Out of these brutal- 
ized and reactionary elements a permanent profes- 
sional standing army has been created, based on 
twelve years' service with the colors, as the Treaty 
of Versailles prescribes. In Herr Noske's intention 
it was mainly, perhaps solely, an anti-revolutionary 
army. It supported the permanent state of siege 
through which he governed, and was used to sup- 
press strikes and to intimidate the workers. His 
idea evidently was to restore not merely order, but 
the old discipline of work, the former habit of sub- 
missive industry, by the dread which its grenades 
and machine guns inspired. This " white " mili- 
tarism, whether one studies it in its savage manifes- 
tations in Hungary, where corps of officers, pre- 
sumably of gentle birth, personally engaged in whole- 
sale executions of untried Socialists, and amused 
themselves by stripping and violating women and 



130 AFTER THE PEACE 

mutilating men, or in the more orderly brutality of 
Noske's " guards,'* reveals the change which war 
has wrought in the mind of civilized Europe. The 
inhibitions of custom and precept, which in our early 
years gradually suppress the primitive savage within 
us, were broken down by the experience of four years 
of organized violence. Men who before the war 
would have thought it unnatural and difficult to hurt 
and injure another, made the discovery that it is 
really very easy to kill. Every one, from Sparta- 
cists to Junkers, now resorted easily, instinctively, 
naturally, to violence, and in some the lust of cruelty 
had grown accustomed to periodic satisfaction. The 
politics of Europe, alike in its class and in its inter- 
national struggles, will reflect the brutalities of the 
war for twenty years to come. 

When the British and American Governments in- 
sisted on abolishing conscription in Central Europe, 
and set up small professional armies in its place, 
they were thinking of " militarism " only in its in- 
ternational aspect. They meant to make Germany 
impotent for a war of revenge. They failed to see 
that in the bitter class struggle which prevails every- 
where on the Continent, they were placing a weapon 
in the hands of capital and the Junker class for use 
against the workers. In England, it is still possible 
to have a professional army which is, as yet, more 
or less non-political, because our Labor movement 
has scarcely begun to raise fundamental issues. We 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 131 

are, as a nation, somewhat indifferent to ideas, and 
relatively apathetic in politics, as these starving peo- 
ples cannot be who live on the edge of the abyss. 
At our General Election about 55 per cent, took 
the trouble to vote, as against over 90 per cent, in 
Germany. An army cannot stand aloof. It will 
be either Socialistic or reactionary. Under its old 
professional officers its character is fixed. By far 
the safer course would have been to have dispensed 
with any standing army at all, and to have allowed 
the creation of a citizen militia on the Swiss model. 
Drawn from all classes and all opinions, it could 
not have been used to further by violence the politics 
of any one class. Nor would a militia of this type, 
with the experience of the war behind it, be likely to 
back a policy of adventure and revenge. It is only 
a small minority which enjoys war for its own sake, 
but it is precisely this minority which now consti- 
tutes the standing army. The issue has still to be 
decided whether the Allies can enforce the reduction 
of this army to the Treaty figure of 100,000 men. 
My own conviction is that the Allies will fail, and 
that even if Germany complies outwardly, a reserve 
class army will somehow be maintained and perhaps 
tolerated in excess of the nominal allowance. It is 
probably true that a force of 100,000 men is not 
sufficient to prevent attempts at social revolution in 
Germany, unless a part of the middle class retains 
arms and a rudimentary military organization. In 



132 AFTER THE PEACE 

any event the Junkers can play upon that fear. 
Their further hope, that a day will come when even 
a relatively small and ill-equipped army may be able 
to achieve something on the Rhine, is not entirely 
chimerical, if we continue to squander our forces 
simultaneously against Russia, Turkey, Ireland and 
the peoples of the Middle East. 

It is obvious that the creation of these profes- 
sional armies in Central Europe has put an end to 
the momentary military impotence of the middle 
classes. The conditions for successful revolution 
are no longer so favorable as they were immediately 
after the armistice, though the motive of economic 
misery may be no less powerful. Unless a Russian 
army were within easy distance of Berlin, it is not 
easy to-day to conceive even the temporary triumph 
of an armed German revolution. On the other hand, 
I find it equally hard to believe in the success for 
many consecutive weeks or months of a monarchist- 
militarist coup d'etat. The experience gained in 
'Herr von Kapp's attempt was illuminating. It was 
defeated in spite of the weakness of the Coalition 
Government, and the active or passive support of 
almost all the armed regular force, both troops and 
police, by the workers' general strike and the passive 
resistance of the .Republican bureaucracy. The 
strike came as the instinctive response of the people 
to a challenge from the hated Junker class, and was 
maintained, almost without organization, with an i^n- 



HOW WILL EUROPE REACT? 133 

pressive and formidable unanimity. The political 
strike is a powerful weapon of defense, and prob- 
ably will avail to break any similar challenge from 
the capitalist reaction in the future. On the other 
hand, its defects as an aggressive tactic are equally 
evident. The moment that a working class ceases 
merely to resist, and attempts by the general strike 
to extort something positive, it is easily outmaneu- 
vered. The pressure of a device, which entails semi- 
starvation on those who use it, cannot be kept up 
indefinitely, nor can it be renewed at frequent in- 
tervals. When the Kappist conspirators admitted 
defeat, the Strike Committee sought permanent 
guarantees from the reinstated Coalition Cabinet. 
It got them in words. The Junker ringleaders were 
to be punished. The disloyal troops were to be dis- 
banded. Formations of armed workmen were to 
be enlisted. The coal-mines were to be Socialized. 
Not one of these promises has been kept, nor was 
there even a serious attempt to honor them. The 
Russian general strike of 1905 led to a similar expe- 
rience, A Constitution was promised, but the ful- 
filment made it useless in practice. A general strike 
may shake a ruling class, but it makes no lasting con- 
quests, unless it is backed (as in Petrograd in 191 7) 
by armed force. A strike is a siege which weakens 
the enemy garrison, but a storming party is required 
to occupy the fortress. 

If the class struggle in Germany is waged only 



134 AFTER THE PEACE 

within its own borders, the most probable outcome 
is perhaps stalemate. Each side may attempt to 
use force. Each will find, even if it achieves mo- 
mentary success, that its triumph is short-lived. 
Strikes, general or recurrent, would baffle a jack- 
boot monarchy. A proletarian dictatorship, if it 
could be proclaimed, and if it could defeat on the 
battlefield opponents who are made of sounder metal 
than any Kolchak or Denikin, would still have to 
overcome the passive resistance of the food-produc- 
ing countryside. That might conceivably be man- 
aged, but only if Russia were in a position to help not 
merely with arms but with grain, which she could 
both grow and transport. 

This hasty reconnaissance of the three roads by 
which Central Europe might attempt to make a 
sortie from her misery has led us to a negative con- 
clusion. The forces of revolution and reaction seem 
to neutralize each other. The middle path will lead 
nowhere, unless the victorious capitalist States 
promptly abandon their dream of exploiting the 
vanquished, and positively foster the industry which 
they have ruined for their own ends. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MANDATES AND THE LEAGUE 

The history of that curious device, the " Man- 
dates," given by the League of Nations to the vic- 
tors for the government of conquered territories 
overseas, illustrates at once the strength and the 
weakness of idealistic movements in the world to- 
day. The repugnance which all Socialists and some 
Liberals felt at the thought of waging " a war of 
liberation " for the usual ends of conquest, had a 
certain influence upon the Allied Governments. 
The pressure for a peace based on the Stockholm 
formulae was powerful during the dark months of 
1 91 7. We knew, moreover, that our acquisitive 
propensities are not favorably regarded in Amer- 
ica. The volume of criticism was strong enough to 
suggest to our rulers that it might be wise to avoid 
the appearance of annexation. It was too weak to 
deter them from reality. The notion of " Man- 
dates " fitted comfortably enough into the prevalent 
ideology of Imperialism. We always do profess to 
hold the territory which we seize as a " sacred 
trust." Great care was taken, however, to omit 

135 



136 AFTER THE PEACE 

from the Settlement every detail which might have 
led to an honest interpretation of the idea. The 
British Labor Party, for example, had proposed that 
the whole of tropical Africa, and not merely the 
former German colonies, should be placed under the 
League of Nations. We hoped in this way to bring 
the Belgian, the Portuguese, and the French colonies, 
worse governed by far, from the native standpoint, 
than the German possessions, under the supervision 
of the League. This would have ended our own 
recent policy of monopoly in the tropical vegetable 
oils, and also the odious French schemes for the 
military conscription of the natives. It was also a 
part of our plan that the mandated areas should be 
subject to searching and continuous inspection by 
officers of the League. More important, however, 
even than these details, was our proposal that the 
League of Nations should be, above all things, an 
economic structure. We proposed to continue in 
peace, for the benefit of all the world, the rationing 
of raw materials which the Allies had improvised 
during war. If the coal, the iron, the oil, the cot- 
ton, the wool, the phosphates and the grain had been 
distributed under international control from the first 
day of the armistice onward, the Continent would 
have escaped the dearth which seems to-day to doom 
its civilization. The League could have governed 
by dispensing these necessary things, nor would any 
problem have arisen in regard to the oil of Mosul 



MANDATES AND THE LEAGUE 137 

or the phosphates of Nauru. ^ They would have 
been distributed to all who needed them, in propor- 
tions fixed by a standing Council of the League. 
None of these conditions commended themselves to 
the Allies. The power of a critical opposition dis- 
appeared in the hour of triumph, and the " Man- 
dates '* served only as a disguise to cover the fact of 
annexation. 

AN INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE 

Could disinterested government of backward peo- 
ples be attained if these conditions were observed? 
Where a Civil Service has a high tradition of duty 
and honor, as in British West Africa it certainly 
has, the thing is not impossible. The scandals of 
African colonization have never been due to the 
spontaneous vices of any Civil Service — British, 
French or German. They begin only when the in- 
terested views of the settler, the planter, the trader 
and the concessionaire have overborne or corrupted 
the administrator. The daring idea which the Brit- 

^The produce of the rich phosphate deposits of Nauru, a 
former German possession in the Pacific, are to be divided 
between the British^ Australian and New Zealand markets. 
If any surplus of this invaluable fertilizer remains over, it 
may be sold to the rest of the world at competitive prices. 
The oil of Mesopotamia is to be divided, three parts to British 
and one part to French interests. The mandates for these 
places were assigned by the Allies to themselves, the terms of 
the Charter drawn up, and the division of the material re- 
sources arranged, without even a pretense of consulting the 
League. 



138 AFTER THE PEACE 

ish Labor Party originally put forward (to modify 
it later), that direct government of tropical Africa 
might be confided to the League of Nations, has been 
dismissed much too lightly by the man of the world 
as Utopian. Short of this solution, there is no 
final cure for the rivalry of Empires. In no other 
way can we hope to discard once for all the tradi- 
tion that a colony is an estate and a possession, 
which some white nation, or its ruling class, keeps 
for its own use, to the exclusion of others. It im- 
plies, needless to say, a League of Nations which 
has won an assured position of authority for itself. 
It might work ill, moreover, unless the League had 
its democratic Assembly, in which a vigilant oppo- 
sition would conduct a probing scrutiny into the 
doings of its officials. The crux of this problem 
is really the question whether an International Civil 
Service can be created. Every national service has 
a tradition of its own, more or less fixed by tem- 
perament, history and education. One is inclined 
on first thoughts to conceive an International Service 
as a corps which would necessarily lack traditions or 
personality or character. Could the men of many 
nations who formed it contrive to reconcile their 
many divergent conceptions of conduct, personal 
rights and the native^s status, so as to form a service 
capable of cohesion, discipline and unity? If one 
were to amalgamate the existing services in the 



MANDATES AND THE LEAGUE 139 

tropics, and recruit new aspirants at haphazard, the 
result would certainly be chaos. 

The key to this problem is education. There is 
just one international body in the world which has 
solved it, and it is the Catholic Church. The So- 
ciety of Jesus has never- in all its many enterprises 
— educational, missionary, administrative and dip- 
lomatic — failed to blend its novices into a solid 
phalanx. Its failures and errors have never been 
due to nationalist friction or racial incompatibility. 
Its success in blending, men of all nationalities has 
been due to a common system of education. In its 
schools and colleges it created a Jesuit mind, which, 
with all its failings and its qualities, superseded what 
was particularist and provincial in the original na- 
tional character of its novices. The tale is dim and 
half- forgotten to-day of the Jesuit Communist State 
in Paraguay. Few of us could recall any account 
of it ^ save in the jesting pages of Candid e. The 
balance of evidence is, however, that for a century 
and a half the Fathers promoted the welfare of a 
big American-Indian population with a disinterested- 
ness and a success unique in the history of the deal- 
ings of white with colored men. This gentle and 
intelligent but by no means enterprising population 
never responded to the European stimulus of profit 

1 See the delightful record in A Vanquished Arcadia, by 
R. B. Cunningham-Graham. 



I40 AFTER THE PEACE 

for individual work. The Jesuits organized it for 
social labor, and all the wealth of its great planta- 
tions was owned in common. With the image of a 
Saint, with banners and a choir at its head each 
village went out in the morning singing to its fields, 
and singing returned in the evening. Festivals and 
pageants, always with a religious meaning, kept the 
people gay. They erected churches of a noble archi- 
tecture, and cultivated classical chamber music. 
The records show that these Fathers who taught the 
natives to build up a thriving agricultural life, and 
gave to all their labors the rhythm of a happy song, 
were men of all races — Germans, Dutch, Irish and 
Poles, as well as Spaniards and Italians. This ex- 
periment proves, at least, that a common education 
can create an International Civil Service. That 
same achievement need not be beyond the capacity 
of the League of Nations. 

The first step would be to create a college or col- 
leges endowed by the League. One might be 
founded at Cairo for African studies, and another 
at Constantinople or Damascus for Oriental needs. 
The teaching staff must itself be international, and 
should include experienced practical administrators, 
as well as the ablest linguists, historians, economists 
and anthropologists drawn from the Universities of 
all Europe and America. The students would be 
young men and women of all nations who feel the 
attraction of this career — Scandinavians, Germans, 



MANDATES AND THE LEAGUE 141 

Americans and Russians, as well as Englishmen and 
Frenchmen. They would spend some years together 
in close touch with the native life of Cairo and 
Damascus. They might learn their Arabic at the 
ancient Moslem University of El Azhar, where one 
may see the faithful of all Africa, black, tawny and 
white, at their rhythmic prayers. If there were 
among the professors even a few who had magne- 
tism and imagination, a common mind and a com- 
mon tradition, based on love for these simple peo- 
ples and an ambition of social service, would grow 
up among the students. It should be understood 
that the graduates, without regard to nationality, 
should be drafted to serve in British, French, Bel- 
gium or Portuguese colonies and mandated areas, as 
vacancies arose. At the end of a generation, or less, 
the process of internationalization would be com- 
pleted, and all tropical Africa might be transferred 
without a wrench or a perceptible disturbance, to the 
direct Government of the League. From this same 
college, backward Oriental States, like Persia, might 
draw the administrative assistance they required. 

THE POLITICS OF OIL 

Is it childish, in view of the ugly reality, to pur- 
sue these Utopian dreams? One wearies of the 
negative, cynical attack. It is too easy to demon- 
strate the crude acquisitive motive at work in Mes- 
opotamia or Nauru. How should we, who loathe 



142 AFTER THE PEACE 

Imperialism and believe in the ideal of the League, 
solve the problem of Mesopotamia and its oil? 
The instinct which carries the conqueror there is not 
wholly anti-social. The world needs this source of 
power and heat and light. Civilization is going 
under in Europe for lack of coal, or its substitute, 
oil. The sparse tribes of half -nomad Arabs and 
Kurds who live round Mosul can have no right to 
deny its resources to the rest of mankind. But it 
is equally clear, if we start from this premise, that 
the victor who happens to have given himself a 
" mandate " for this territory has also no right in 
morals to monopolize the product. It is easy to say 
that the oil should be assigned on an equitable per- 
centage basis to the various peoples who need it. 
That principle can hardly be applied, however, un- 
less it be generalized. Only if an International 
Commission of the League of Nations had the right 
to control all the exportable surpluses of the world's 
oil-fields, could a rationing system be applied fairly 
to the yield of Mesopotamia. As things are, this 
question has been settled by a rough rule of grab by 
the two chief European victors.^ Mosul, in point 
of fact, fell under the Secret Treaties to France. 
Their neatly colored maps showed it plainly in the 
French sphere. It was our troops who acquired it, 

^ There is good reason to believe that we have also a secret 
agreement with France, by which we divide between us, in 
; equal parts, the oil of Roumania. 



MANDATES AND THE LEAGUE 143 

however, and hold it, and our Foreign Office was 
able to produce a concession granted by the Turks 
on the eve of the war. If the French insisted on 
taking the territory, we should none the less claim 
the whole of the oil. The result, after hot and 
angry debates in the French Chamber, is that we 
keep the territory and 75 per cent, of the oil. The 
remaining 25 per cent, goes to France. The needs 
of the rest of the world were apparently not con- 
sidered. 

So far, however, we have only touched the fringe 
of this problem of property. The phosphates of 
Nauru are to be worked as a Government monopoly. 
There is in the scheme for distributing the yield a 
bafflingly naive national egoism. But no private in- 
terest gains. The British and colonial farmer will 
get his fertilizer at or about cost price. The same 
Government which believes in nationalizing phos- 
phates, scouts the idea of treating the oil of Meso- 
potamia on a similar plan. It will fall to one of the 
existing syndicates. The tax-payer at home will 
bear the cost of the big garrison which occupies 
Mesopotamia. The French revenue will be charged 
with the cost of the army which secures the pipe-line 
from Mosul to a Syrian port. The syndicate, re- 
lieved from these first charges, will make its profits 
on the oil. Conquest does not " pay," if one re- 
gards it as a national enterprise, but most assuredly 
it pays from the standpoint of " big business." 



144 AFTER THE PEACE 

If a Labor Government had been in power, it 
would have found in this question of Mosul the 
test of its morals and its statemanship. Its first 
task would have been to appeal to the intelligence 
of the people of Mesopotamia, so that the develop- 
ment of the oil-field could have been arranged with- 
out a garrison of 80,000 men to enforce it, and 
without those aeroplane patrols, which scour the 
desert and drop their bombs when they see a tribe 
moving below them. It would have wanted much 
patience and tact. But suppose we could have said 
with complete honesty: "The profits of this piece 
of work which we propose to do in Mosul shall all 
of them remain in the country. Year by year they 
will constitute a fund which shall be used entirely 
for your benefit. With them we will build houses 
to replace your miserable huts. With them we will 
pay teachers for your children and doctors for your 
sick. Your fields shall be irrigated. Your flocks 
and herds and grain shall be raised from improved 
stocks and seeds. And since life is more than bread 
and meat, we aim also at something more. We will 
create in Bagdad, with the profits of this oil, a great 
Mohammedan University. We will bring back the 
glories of the Caliphs, and restore the culture and 
the wealth that made of Bagdad one of the great 
cities of civilization. The oil we shall sell at a low 
price to the whole world that needs it. Our engi- 
neers shall receive adequate salaries. But the entire 



MANDATES AND THE LEAGUE 145 

profits of the enterprise, after interest has been paid 
on the borrowed capital, belong to the people of 
Mesopotamia. Appoint your Council to watch our 
work. Name your expert auditors to see that we 
keep our word to you. But leave us unmolested to 
do a great work for you, for Islam, for God's 
glory, and for the whole of civilization.'* William 
Penn, with a much less advanced population, made 
a success of a much less attractive scheme than this. 
I cherish the belief that a big man, a man of magne- 
tism and evident honesty, could carry it through 
without so much as an aeroplane to back him. 

But these are fancies. Our capitalist Imperial- 
ism works on other lines. It has seized the oil. 
The profits will go to a syndicate of financiers. 
Mosul will be dragooned by air-men and lancers, 
at the cost of the submissive tax-payer. The world 
will laugh at our cynicism, and in Bagdad no Arab 
renaissance will flower again. 



CONCLUSION 

If the reader's patience has enabled him to reach 
the last pages of this gloomy book, his opinion is 
already formed concerning its main thesis. In its 
description of the actual conditions of Central and 
Eastern Europe there is nothing that is new, and 
little that is disputable. Most of the main facts can 
be verified in our own official publications. Central 
Europe is but half employed: it is hal f -starved : its 
death-rate means the rapid diminution of its popula- 
tion: complete bankruptcy threatens it: with this 
lapse into a slum existence its culture also must dis- 
appear. Poland is in a state appreciably worse, and 
Russia after the war, the civil war and the blockade, 
is fast losing the outward appearance of a civilized 
State. These are facts which no instructed critic 
will gainsay. 

The case, to put it a little more precisely, seems 
to be that it is especially the urban civilization of 
Europe which is threatened. The peasantry will 
survive (thinned, indeed, in the East by devastating 
epidemics) and perpetuate the less advanced, the less 
cultivated portion of each nation. It is the towns 
and the industrial populations which are menaced 

146 



CONCLUSION 147 

with a rapid decline. The emancipation of the coun- 
try from its old tributary relation to the town, and 
the Balkanization of great parts of Central Europe, 
with the arrest of internal exchange which has fol- 
lowed it, conspire with the financial clauses of the 
Versailles Treaty to forbid the hope that the towns 
can make rapid recovery. 

The thesis of this book is that, in this ghastly 
process, there was nothing accidental. The peace 
was the expression of the mind of the capitalist 
classes in Great Britain and France, incarnated by 
statesmen who won an overwhelming verdict of ap- 
proval at the polls. It is a case, infinitely more 
cruel, infinitely more vast than anything in the pre- 
vious history of the world, which shows, as many 
cases on a smaller scale have shown, the workings of 
the competitive motive in Imperialism. Capitalism 
does not aim at production: it aims at profit. In 
this settlement it has overreached itself. The profit 
to certain interests will be immense, but it may also 
be fleeting. A settlement which has reduced the 
productive capacity of the greater part of the Con- 
tinent to a fraction of what it was, and again might 
be, will have for its consequence, if it endures, the 
ruin of Europe and of our common civilization. 

To see the motive is also to be skeptical of a rem- 
edy. Some of those responsible may feel that they 
have gone too far : some may recoil from the more 
repugnant consequences. To do them justice, those 



148 AFTER THE PEACE 

who meant to ruin the German world-trade did not 
see in a vision the millions of diseased and starving 
children who would testify to the completeness of 
the achievement. The motive, however, still works. 
The strategical mastery must be retained, and that 
involves Balkanization. Where we might relax and 
relent, the French hold us back. The grasping pred- 
atory attitude cannot be reversed without risk to the 
whole structure. Liberals who believe that the 
League of Nations can begin to work, or that the 
Treaties can now be revised by general consent, turn 
a blind eye to the real force which governs the world. 
This is Capitalist Imperialism. Its excesses might 
be pruned away by an Asquith or a Caillaux, if 
ever they return to office, but they would be the 
last men to give away the power which enables us 
to extort economic gain from naval and military 
mastery. A little more prudent, a little more hu- 
mane they might perhaps be, but they would sur- 
render none of the advantages which enable the rul- 
ing class of a dominant nation to exploit other 
peoples overseas, by the use of force, for its own 
particular gain. 

We saw this system at work in the world before 
the war, from India to Morocco. This war has 
turned it loose upon the Continent, at the expense 
of peoples of our own race and culture, and the best 
hope that seems to emerge from it is, perhaps, that 
Rome may exploit Carthage instead of destroying 



CONCLUSION 149 

it. At present it is the cruder alternative that pre- 
vails. Capitalism does not, and with its present 
aims and purposes cannot, provide the food and 
the fuel which the populations of Europe need. 
Production for profit instead of use has, by its 
monstrous evolution into Imperialism, undone the 
first promise of plenty which lay in the industrial 
system. 

The idealism of the League of Nations, the Chris- 
tian internationalism of a Cecil, the humanity of a 
part of our Liberal press, testify to the genuineness 
of our English civilization. They seem, none the 
less, in the light of this wilful ruin of Europe, a 
pathetic attempt to build upon an unsound founda- 
tion. While the motive of profit rules us, while 
competition rather than social service is our law, 
while autocracy for profit in the workshop answers 
to expansion by force for gain overseas, in a word, 
while capitalism survives, it is vain to dream of a 
genuine internationalism. The motive of work must 
be changed, and with the motive the whole system 
of production. 

It would be unprofitable to speculate further on 
the question whether Central Europe is destined to 
pass under the sway of the Moscow International. 
If Lenin had had 50,000 locomotives at his disposal 
at any time in this last two years, with coal to run 
them, his frontier to-day would be the Rhine. It 
is the doubt whether a blockaded Europe can feed 



150 AFTER THE PEACE 

itself, which avails to keep Germany, Austria and 
even Italy within the capitalist system. Transport 
is the fatal obstacle. This at least is clear, that if 
Europe and Siberia could be united under one fed- 
eral system from the Rhine to Lake Baikal, half 
the phenomena of ruin would disappear with the 
end of Balkanization. Frontiers would go down. 
The provincial egoisms which are starving Vienna 
would vanish with the petty nationalism on which 
they are based. Whatever Siberia or the Ukraine 
or Hungary had of grain, whatever Westphalia, 
Silesia and Teschen had of coal, would be distrib- 
uted, with no regard for local selfishness, to satisfy 
the general need. Europe craves, above all, this 
pooling of its resources, which the Allies are too 
selfish, the League too weak, to impose. If Mos- 
cow had railway engines and ships, this one prin- 
ciple of solidarity would alone ensure its victory. 
It lacks the engines : it has no ships. Its victory de- 
pends on chances too uncertain for prediction. The 
odds, I think, are against it, but one or both of two 
possible follies might bring it about — the seizure 
under French pressure of the Ruhr and Upper Sil- 
esian coal-fields, or the renewal with French aid of 
the Polish war. 

Are we then, the reader will ask, in a mood of 
scientific pessimism, to sit idle, watching the agony 
of great and gifted nations, waiting for the dis- 
tant day when, by one process or another, the Brit- 



CONCLUSION 151 

ish Empire has become a Socialist State? Long 
before that transformation has even begun in earn- 
est, the Labor Party may have the majority, or at 
least the balancing vote in Parliament. What 
should be, in that event, the international policy of 
the Labor Party? 

To answer that question by drafting a series of 
aspirations for the reform and revision of the whole 
set of Paris Treaties would be at once easy and fu- 
tile. One cannot conduct foreign policy as one legis- 
lates at home. The revision of Treaties requires the 
consent of the other parties to them, and one need 
hardly point out that every one of the changes which 
we should demand would be resisted with all the 
force of national egoism by one or more of the 
Allies. Nbr would it greatly help us to summon 
a conference of Governments, in the hope that the 
general body of disinterested opinion would in each 
case vote down the resistance of the interested Allies. 
They would see that danger, and form a Coalition 
to defend the Treaties in their integrity. They 
would ask us, moreover, what we proposed to con- 
tribute as our sacrifice to the general good. At this 
point our worst difficulties would begin. The mo- 
ment that Labor begins to give away anything which 
looks like an Imperial asset, be it only a bad debt, 
it will discover that office is not power, and that a 
majority of the electors would count for little against 
the resolute opposition of most of the press, the 



152 AFTER THE PEACE 

House of Lords, the Court, the City, the Domin- 
ions, and the whole official class. Weakened by this 
resistance at home, it would have little prospect of 
dealing successfully with France, who would lead 
the opposition to revision. The task would demand 
almost superhuman adroitness and determination, 
and could be achieved only by an appeal to the opin- 
ion of the world's masses, by every device of pub- 
licity at home and abroad — ^ in a word, by a miracle 
of persuasion. 

These might be some of the guiding ideas in our 
policy and tactics :-r- 

1. The first step would be to put an end to the 

informal Alliance of the Victors. So far 
as we know, no written alliance exists: if 
there are secret commitments, they must be 
disclosed and denounced. In plain words, 
all the Allies must understand that we take 
no further responsibility for the enforcement 
of any of the Treaties, if they on their side 
refuse to bring them into conformity with 
humanity and economic reason. The Su- 
preme Council must cease to meet, and mili- 
tary " conversations " come to an end. 

2. Our acts of sacrifice should be, if others will 

reciprocate : (a) to cancel all the Allies' debts 
to us; they are probably bad debts in any 
case, and they destroy good relations; (&) to 
forego our part in the German indemnity; 



CONCLUSION 153 

(c) to offer to share out such prizes of vic- 
tory as the oil of Mesopotamia and the phos- 
phates of Nauru, according to the world's 
needs ; and (d) to give up our unlimited right 
of blockade, and reduce our navy drastically, 
if France and the United States will join us 
in accepting and imposing a genuine and im- 
partial scheme of disarmament by land and 
sea. 
These offers will probably fail. America will 
prefer to retain her isolation, her navy and her ab- 
solute sovereignty, and France her militarism. 

3. We should next propose that the German in- 

demnity be reduced to a possible and honest 
figure, and paid, preferably by reparation in 
kind: (a) in labor and materials for the res- 
toration of Northern France, and (b) in 
coal (including the yield of the Saar) to bal- 
ance the destruction of the French mines. 
If France refuses, as she probably would, to make 
these concessions, we should withdraw our troops 
from the Rhine, and wash our hands of the conse- 
quences to France. 

4. Our positive policy for the restoration of Con- 

tinental Civilization should then take the 
form of the foundation of an Economic 
League. The League of Nations, as it now 
exists, is all but useless, if America will ac- 
cept its Covenant only with reservations 



154 AFTER THE PEACE 

which destroy it, while France is avowedly 
hostile to the whole idea, and Germany and 
Russia remain outside. 
The purpose of this Economic League should be, 
by the rationing of raw materials and the breaking 
down of every artificial barrier to exchange, to con- 
stitute a vast economic unit, and so undo the mis- 
chief of Balkanization. The intention would be to 
include the British Empire, Germany, Russia, Italy, 
and all the former H'apsburg States, and any other 
State which cares to join. Admission would .in- 
volve, on our part and theirs, the abandonment of 
all nationalist policies of monopoly. It would im- 
ply (a) the rationing of raw materials, especially 
coal, grain, oil and fertilizers; (b) mutual aid in 
transport; (c) some control of industry, so that, 
for example, the whole productive capacity of both 
the British and the Ger^man workshops could be 
mobilized to turn out, for all the members of the 
League, locomotives, motor-ploughs and other 
tools ^ ; and (d) the distribution of these instru- 
ments of production, if necessary on long credit, 
according to need, (e) This would involve an 
international loan. 

The governing idea of this League would be that 
the urban civilization of Europe can be saved only 

^ While all Europe cries out for agricultural machinery, 
there are 3,000 unemployed in the engineering workshops of 
Lincoln. 



CONCLUSION 155 

by a united effort, and that it is to the interest of us 
all to stimulate the utmost productivity of Siberian 
or Ukrainian agriculture. Towards Germany the 
policy would be not merely to reverse the egoism of 
the Treaty, but positively to foster every form of 
production in Central Europe, industrial or agri- 
cultural, in order to meet the common need. 

How France would react to such a policy it is 
difficult to foresee. She dreads isolation, and a firm 
front might impress her, but more probably she 
would reckon (with much encouragement from the 
Opposition among ourselves) on the early collapse 
of the Labor Government and the reversal of its 
policy. In that case a rivalry would ensue in Eu- 
rope between her military League and our Economic 
League. She would try to promote the reaction 
everywhere, for example, by fostering monarchist 
clericalism in Bavaria, Austria and Hungary. We 
should then have to counter her intrigues, for exam- 
ple, by supporting the union of Austria with Ger- 
many, in spite of the fact that the Treaty forbids 
it. The military dangers of such a rivalry are ob- 
vious. 

" This program," the reader may say, *' is a re- 
ductio ad absurdum. The somewhat similar pro- 
posals in Mr. Keynes' book read smoothly enough, 
because he confined himself to economics. You 
have introduced also the political and military ques- 
tions. Do you, frankly, see the Labor Party under 



156 AFTER THE PEACE 

its present Parliamentary leaders following a spirited 
policy of this kind, with the Times thundering at 
them every day, and the exchange sinking? " 

I am not sanguine of the success of such a policy 
in the hands of either the Labor Party or even of 
the Labor Party allied with the remnants of Liber- 
alism. 

I believe, however, that the British Empire, under 
firm leadership, could even at this late hour, by the 
adoption of such a policy, save Europe, force the 
revision of the Treaties, restore the productivity of 
the Continent, and bring back the glories of its 
civilization. If it, as a solid unit, were known to 
be resolved on this course, it has the strength to 
carry it through single-handed, and that without the 
smallest risk of war. 

I have spoken of " sacrifices.'* The word is de- 
ceptive. Some momentary renunciation there might 
be. In the end, when after two or three years of 
intensive effort, the grain ships filed again through 
the Turkish Straits from Odessa, and a continuous 
procession of trains carried the harvests and the 
dairy produce of Siberia to the West, as the grass 
ceased to grow on the quays of Hamburg, and 
Vienna sang again at its work, we should laugh at 
the suggestion of sacrifice. Plenty would return, 
and with falling prices, wages would gain in value. 
Under a great leader, who had the whole Empire 
with him, we could bring back the reality of peace 



CONCLUSION 1S7 

to the world. It would demand audacity, will, imag- 
ination. It could not be carried through, unless we 
were ready, after first cleansing our own hands of 
greedy gains, to face French militarism and cir- 
cumvent it. It might end not merely in the eco- 
nomic restoration of Europe, but in the reconstruc- 
tion of the League of Nations on a surer basis, with 
the conscious soul of mutual aid for the breath of 
its life. 

So far I have faith. What I doubt is whether 
any party, whatever its majority, be it Labor, Liber- 
alism, or both together, can ever hope to wield the 
power of the British Empire for any humane end, 
which seems on a narrow view to conflict with the 
interests of our capitalist governing class. 

Let us, none the less, make the experiment with 
all the resolution and all the contriving intelligence 
we possess. Nothing in domestic politics touches 
the importance of this issue, whether the civiliza- 
tion of Europe shall be destroyed by Capitalist Im- 
perialism. Let us seek all the Allies we can dis- 
cover, be they Liberal or Tory. One does not play 
at party games when millions of one's fellows are 
perishing before one's eyes. The chance may come 
too late as the years lengthen out. It may find us 
too weak, when at length it arrives. It may come 
only to demonstrate that the power of wealth in a 
Parliamentary democracy can frustrate the good- 
will of the many. In that event, the question of 



158 AFTER THE PEACE 

this book will be answered. Thef sentence will be 
written, that by its greed of profits, by its militarism 
and imperialism, Capitalism has evolved on suicidal 
lines, that it cannot produce the goods which man- 
kind demands, or feed the populations of Europe. 
That sentence will be cast in one of two forms. It 
may ring out ^as the rallying cry of a revolution. 
It may stand upon the tombstone of a defeated civil- 
ization. 



THE END — ' 



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